by Kata Dozsa, postdoctoral researcher, ERC Research Project Curiae Virides, Brussels School of Governance, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Ecological conflicts rarely remain confined to one legal system, one type of actor or one way of describing harm. The ERC Curiae Virides project has examined this complexity through its research on transnational ecological litigation: how local ecological risks or harms transform into legal mobilisation, disputes move across jurisdictions, how actors build and adapt litigation strategies, and how courts interact with communities, civil society organisations and other stakeholders in conflicts that extend beyond a single courtroom.
On 27–28 August 2026, the project brought practitioners, organisations, lawyers and other non-academic experts together at the Brussels School of Governance, for a two-day stakeholder workshop. Our aim was to present the project’s preliminary empirical findings to our stakeholders who encounter ecological conflicts from different professional and regional perspectives. We engaged in a discussion on what are the main ecological, legal-procedural and socio-economic dynamics surrounding the cases withing such diverse geographical and geopolitical contexts. For example, our empirical research explores the motivation of actors involved in legal mobilisation as well as the litigation strategies that carry transnational implications. Our workshop participants were invited to reflect on jurisdictional or regional ecological specificities they encounter as opportunities, constraints or obstacles.
From transnational proceedings to ecological conflicts
The first day we held two roundtable sessions on the preliminary findings of the qualitative empirical research. The programme deliberately shifted the focus from the architecture of litigation to the people and conflicts behind it. The opening discussion considered the typology of transnational proceedings, the motifs and strategies behind litigation, the dynamics and movement of actors, and the role and status of affected communities.
The reflections from our participants substantiated our understanding of transnational ecological litigation as not a single category of conflicts but a multi-dimensional interaction of legal systems, cross-border value chains, and state and non-state actors who transform local issues into transnational concerns. These interactions are also fluid: claims can travel through different jurisdictions, legal fields and procedural routes; the actors involved may change as disputes develop; and litigation is used for different purposes from seeking a concrete remedy to creating pressure, visibility or legal precedent.
The discussion led by Liliana Lizarazo Rodriguez and Kata Dozsa not only explored the litigation process more broadly but also looked at the human layers (victims, actors, resources and networks) in ecological conflicts, with a particular attention to where affected communities stand within these processes. This question is one of the key assessment points in the Curiae Virides research as ecological harms and risks affect people who may lose their homes and livelihoods, suffer health decline, or are forced to give up cultural ties to land and water, participation, and the possibility of shaping decisions that affect a community’s future. Yet, the people most directly exposed to environmental harm do not necessarily occupy the most powerful position in litigation (Lizarazo Rodriguez 2021). Legal representation, standing rules, access to expertise, financial resources and the framing of claims can all influence which experiences enter a case and in what form. The status of affected communities therefore connects the study of litigation directly to questions of human rights and environmental justice.
The second roundtable widened the perspective. It considered regional similarities and differences, best practices, major challenges and emerging opportunities before returning to a larger question: what role can litigation actually play in cross-border ecological conflicts? This comparative element is essential in our findings: similar legal strategies can operate differently across regions due to the distinct procedural rules, institutional capacity, political conditions and relationships between movements, lawyers and communities. These differences can also influence litigation strategies, as access to remedy in one context may be unavailable, ineffective or even counterproductive in another.
The Workshop aimed to place legal proceedings inside the broader ecology of conflict in which they operate. The second day, the Curiae Virides team presented the methodology and the main concepts of the project.
Liliana Lizarazo-Rodriguez presented the structure of the Curiae Virides dataset which currently lists more than three thousand transnational cases globally. João Teixeira de Freitas presented some results of his PhD research on due diligence that zooms into selected cases from the ERC Curiae Virides dataset. Mai Nguyen Thi Xuan showcased our research approach to remedies in the South-East Asian context. Melissa Alberini, explained how data about actors is collected around conflict drivers. In this sense, the workshop linked two forms of evidence: the systematic mapping of cases and the qualitative knowledge generated through interviews and stakeholder experience. Finally, we invited participants to reflect, through a series of take-away activities, on how the findings and outputs of the Curiae Virides project could inform and support their own work. The responses proved as diverse as the participants’ legal approaches to, and capacities for engaging with, ecological conflicts.
At the end of the first afternoon, participants left the workshop room and walked to U-Square building which hosted our side event – a pop-up exhibition where the questions of ecological harm, climate change, and the experiences and views of affected people and were approached through a very different medium.
Eszter Sziksz, 2024. Costa Rica.
Roots and Connections: images of environmental change
The pop-up exhibition Roots and Connections brought together printmaking and sculpture to explore links between environmental change, climate justice, human dignity and shared responsibility. It featured work by printmakers Eszter Sziksz and Justyna Mazur-Kiwer, as well as sculptural installations created by Aisbl Lexilex/Le Silex, a Brussels organisation working with people living with disabilities. The exhibition was organised as part of the Curiae Virides event but was open to the public, deliberately widening the space beyond the closed stakeholder workshop.
The exhibition was organised and curated by Kata Dozsa, who chose printmaking as its central artistic method because of its long association with public expression, collective participation and social and environmental advocacy. Printmaking has a long history as a medium of activism because it combines artistic expression with circulation, repetition and public reach. Its relative affordability and reproducibility have made it particularly suited to protest and advocacy, allowing images and messages to pass from galleries into streets, community spaces and political campaigns. This tradition continues in contemporary environmental and human-rights movements, where print can translate complex claims into direct visual forms and make experiences of social injustice, harm, exclusion, resistance or solidarity easier to communicate. Lehigh University Art Galleries Research on environmental “artivism” also shows how artistic activism can give environmental claims public form and contribute to cognitive and behavioral engagement with sustainability issues. Our pop-up exhibition aimed to build on this tradition by using printmaking not simply as a technique of representation, but as a shared method of inquiry and communication. It created a space in which environmental and human-rights questions could be interpreted visually, collectively and across disciplines, while allowing artists, researchers and visitors to move between legal concepts, personal experience and public expression.
Carried by the wind: Children’s voices on climate justice
The Wind Whispers Project, developed by Eszter Sziksz, DA in collaboration with Kata Dozsa also uses printmaking for voice representation. The project carries young people’s hopes and concerns for a shared climate future into the landscape itself. Messages gathered from children and young people were transformed into temporary prints made with organic ash on Arctic snow and on soil and sand in Costa Rica. Ash was chosen as the material for its symbolism and elemental nature, replacing traditional screen-printing ink.
Eszter Sziksz, 2023. Antarctica.
The messages themselves are reminders of intergenerational responsibility, children’s long-term encounters of climate change impacts, and genuine grief about disappearing natural habitats which generations born today or in the future may not be able to experience. One of them writes:
“I hope we can leave a world behind that we are proud of, with clean air, soil, and water. I wish for the future generations to see and experience the snow”
Another carries a more desperate call for accountability:
“I hate living on a timer, and wonder why the people who started this mess won’t stop it.”
When the wind picks up, the messages will be carried around the glaciers and fjords or by ants and the falling leaves before gradually fading into the landscape. The project uses the environment not simply as a background but as part of the artwork which creates a particular connection between participation, representation and materiality. Young people’s words leave the familiar formats of consultation, everyday conversation or policy statements and become traces embedded in places already marked by climate change. It is an exciting thought that these messages will settle in such breathtaking parts of our world – and by capturing the moments of transformation through still and motion images, the artist delivers them further to the audience. The prints do not claim permanence; they are exposed to weather, movement and the conditions of the environment itself. The form therefore invites reflection on how voices are carried, how long they remain visible, and what it means to represent the interests of people whose future will be shaped by decisions taken before they acquire formal political power.
Eszter Sziksz, 2024. Costa Rica.
How eyes can speak about the connection between observers and the environment
Justyna Mazur-Kiwer’s work invites visitors to “look into” human eyes and consider what it means to witness environmental change. She used handmade recycled paper and a lithographic process based on simple materials such as stone, water and soot to create an installation titled The Exhaustless. People. The collection places the eyes – the gaze, the pupils and the emotions reflected in them – at the centre of the interaction between the individual and the surrounding world. She writes:
“For centuries, the eye has symbolized many profound values, such as knowledge, understanding, and truth. In literature and art, it often serves as a metaphor for the inner gaze, allowing us to perceive things deeper than mere surface appearance. It is also a symbol of life and consciousness, as it is through our eyes that we perceive the world. Every single gaze, even at the same person, carries a completely different narrative. The symbolism of the eye highlights how precious these fleeting, unrepeatable moments truly are.”
There is a legal and environmental resonance in Mazur-Kiwer’s focus on the eye. Environmental harm is not always immediately visible: it may unfold gradually, accumulate across decades, travel across borders or remain distant from those who do not experience its effects directly. Rob Nixon famously described “slow violence” inflicting environmental harm as “dispersed across time and space,” while research on climate perception shows how geographical, temporal and social distance shape the way environmental change is understood. The eye of an “exhaustless” person therefore becomes more than a witness to what is happening in the moment it was captured. It turns back to the point of view of us, observers, whether we attach meaning to the eye – or eyes as a collective – from a distance, proximity or a personal experience, and whether we feel called to respond.
Justyna Mazur-Kiwer, 2026.
Collective visualization of ecological relationships
The sculptural installations by Le Silex Asbl added another dimension to the exhibition by bringing questions of artistic expression, participation and inclusion into the exhibition. Silex is a Brussels-based art centre , bringing together adults with and without intellectual disabilities. Its activities are built around encounter, shared experience and creative expression to enhance social and cultural inclusion, autonomy and participation in public life.In addition to educational and reflective activities on citizenship, culture, and the environment, Silex runs creative workshops as spaces for experimentation, cooperation and expression.
Roots and Connections brought a collective artwork of Silex to the audience: two cloud-like forms built in plaster and covered with hundreds of tiny fragments of coloured mosaic. At a first glance, the forms look different – one large, one small -, yet there is a quiet bond between them: their relationship, their familiarity with one another is immediately apparent. Up close, each surface reveals a careful arrangement of tiny, coloured fragments – each independent, yet inseparable from the whole. The clouds become an image of mutual attachment through their uniqueness, but also through their harmony and closeness. They look playful and fragile at the same time, inviting viewers to think about how individual entities and perspectives can remain distinct while still forming organic part of a shared world.
Environmental justice is inseparable from social justice and inclusion, because fair environmental action requires all perspectives to be heard and considered, especially those of people with limited access to decision-making and public debate. The presence of Silex transformed the exhibition’s message of “rooting and connecting” into a tangible form, embodying an environmental justice that makes space for different backgrounds, different forms of knowledge and expression, and forms of interconnectedness that reach beyond both physical and imagined borders.
Clouds. By Le Silex Asbl.
An interdisciplinary approach: Why connecting environmental law and art?
Both Curiae Virides and Roots and Connections reinforce the idea that ecological conflicts rarely fit neatly within one disciplinary language. While law can identify responsibility, recognise rights, impose duties and provide remedies, many of the lived, emotional and relational dimensions of environmental changes – attachment to place, uncertainty and “non-tangible, non-economic losses” like memory and identity – do not always enter legal proceedings or appear in their full complexity. Research on ecological grief, understood as “the grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses,” shows how environmental degradation can also unsettle people’s sense of place, belonging and identity.
Once a conflict reaches court, it must be translated into legally recognisable claims, evidence and remedies, leaving parts of the wider social reality of the conflict outside the frame. Artistic practice can move in the opposite direction, reopening that frame and allowing emotions, values, memories and forms of knowledge to remain in conversation with one another. A similar role has been identified for storytelling in environmental law, which can help “inject passion and emotion into environmental law” and connect with marginalised perspectives that formal legal reasoning may struggle to accommodate.
While the legal research of Curiae Virides ask questions on who is heard, what counts as harm, whose knowledge carries authority, how environmental change is experienced by different communities, and how responsibility is imagined across generations, the Roots and Connections aimed to leave these questions deliberately open enough to be encountered through visualisation: colour, material, form and personal interpretation rather than through legal argument alone.
Research across environmental communication, participatory practice and the environmental humanities has increasingly explored how artistic methods can bring cognitive, emotional and experiential forms of understanding into the same conversation, forms of understanding into the same conversation, while also offering different points of entry into complex environmental questions. For example, visual art can work through “more emotive and personalized techniques,” creating forms of engagement that conventional scientific communication may not reach. Art can also create space for people who may not be experts in law, science or policy, and bring experiences into public discussion that may be difficult to articulate through jargons of these formal languages.
The move from the Curiae Virides stakeholder roundtable to the exhibition space was therefore not a change of subject in our exchange of views but a continuation of the same conversation through another medium. It also introduced a different kind of interdisciplinary exchange to the BSoG and wider VUB–ULB audience. Through this exhibition, we aimed to explore how artistic practice can interpret legal concepts such as human rights, environmental justice and the rights of nature, while also inviting the audience – including lawyers and legal scholars – to bring visual forms, materials and narratives into their own legal thinking. In that sense, Roots and Connections was an initiative for a two-way interpretation of ecological conflicts – listening to the whispers of children, looking into the eyes of people as individuals and as a collective, and witnessing a diversity of interpretations and choices that connect nature, law and art, and ultimately connect us as human beings.
Curiae Virides Team members celebrating at the end of the pop-up exhibition, on 27 August 2026. (From left to right: Mai Thi Nguyen, Liliana Lizarazo Rodriguez, Kata Dozsa, Melissa Alberini, Martha Robles Ustariz).