Justice is too heavy to sit on

At COP29 in Baku, I stood before a bronze woman Justitia blindfolded, heavy, serene. She sat on the back of a starving man. Her scales tipped toward the absurd, her posture toward the unbearable. Beneath her, the man’s bones strained against the metal surface, his form hollowed by the weight of a justice that refuses to move. 

Figure 1. My photo of JUSTITIA at COP29 Baku Exhibit Pavilion (2024) 

This sculpture, Double Standard by Danish artist Jens Galschiøt, has haunted me since that moment. It is not a monument, but a manifesto in bronze. A living declaration carried from one space to the next. Like a manifesto, it does not ask politely; it demands your attention, it interrupts your movements and it made inequity visible. It named hypocrisy and it moved literally through the world, setting up camp in policy corridors, at pavilions, in debates, refusing to be domesticated by the spaces of diplomacy. 

To craft a manifesto, is to inhabit this same performative gesture. Manifestos matter because they refuse neutrality. They are the aesthetic and political technologies of those who can no longer bear the quiet. For artists, a manifesto is not only a text but a practice, it is an embodied act of witness that creates conditions for others to see and feel what systems of power work so hard to render (in)visible. 

As the Double Standard sculpture testifies, art has the capacity to materialise contradiction and to turn moral imbalance into form and sculpt hypocrisy into public consciousness. When artists make manifestos, they are not only articulating ideals; they are summoning publics, conjuring alternative worlds, and rehearsing the futures that bureaucracies delay. 

This is what manifestos do, they refuse neutrality.

For the last three years as an artist, researcher, and teacher moving through UNFCCC COP spaces, I am increasingly convinced that manifestos are not simply historical artefacts of avant-garde movements. They are living pedagogical technologies, and they matter because they break the spell of polite procedures and emerge when the quiet-still-ness of the time becomes unethical.

A manifesto is not only written; it is enacted and performed. It is a way of standing, placing, staging, and refusing to be silenced. A manifesto is an embodied act of witness that renders visible what systems of power work very hard to keep unseen.

Art, at COP, does something policy cannot. It materialises the contradictions and it sculpts moral imbalance into form. Art gives weight to abstractions like justice, equity, adaptation and “just” transition. It makes delay heavy and it renders hypocrisy uncomfortable.

Figure 2. Two original Jens Galschiøt 3D prints, handed out at the climate summit in Brazil, now sitting on my bookshelf at home (still heavy with implication).

I felt this again when encountering Galschiøt’s later work, The Orange Plague, which appeared as protest at COP30 in Belém. I was so thrilled when I literally ran into Danish artist Jens Galschiøt and his family wheeling this grotesque, exaggerated figure of Donald Trump sitting atop a sinking, emaciated man outside the COP. This was an unmistakable allegory of climate obstruction, denial, and burden on those who have not caused this whole bloody catastrophe but must lead a path forward to live a future in it. Inspired by Danish folktale The Emperor’s New Clothes, the work uses humour, comedy, satire and scale to expose what many institutions still hesitate to name outright – that some are not merely failing climate transition, they are actively weighing it down.

Humour, here, is not flippant, it is a very clever strategy as the exaggeration of weight becomes a way of saying the unsayable in spaces governed by decorum and standards. It’s what an artist does best and it’s what both of these works teach and show me, again and again. Artists do not wait for permission to poke, provoke and proposition they pose a manifesto. When artists make manifestos, they are not simply articulating their ideals, they are summoning publics and rehearsing futures that bureaucracies continue to postpone. An artist manifesto is a form of pedagogy that is affective, relational, and impossible to footnote. 

As an artist-teacher, I think about what it means for young people to encounter climate education only through targets and timelines, stripped of weight, and stripped of bodies. As a researcher, I question what counts as evidence when lived injustice is rendered invisible by procedure. As an artist-teacher, I return to the body, as a site of knowing.

Figure 3. My photo of The Orange Plague at COP30 Brasil (2025)

Standing before The Orange Plague that I ran into on that wet dark night outside COP30 and then holding the pink printed work in my hand I did not feel informed, I felt implicated. Perhaps this is the work needed now. We don’t need more explanations, but more accidental encounters because we don’t need neutrality, we need more careful, and situated refusal. We need to see justice made so heavy that we cannot sit comfortably on its back any longer.

What follows is SWISP Lab’s Hacking the Anthropocene Manifesto, first voiced at the Learning with the Land Symposium, 2025, and carried forward from there.

For more see 10 game-changing art manifestos by By Harriet Baker, published on 9 April 2015

What I have learned from this HAK.io work over the last three years is that when justice is made heavy enough, it becomes impossible to remain seated (physically, ethically, or pedagogically).

This piece began earlier, written alongside conversations with colleagues about the InSEA Crafting Manifesto workshop at the InSEA July, 2025 World Congress in Olomouc, Czech Republic, and carries the reflections that surfaced for me in that moment into the present.