The People's Court I at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo

Installation views of The People’s Court I, Forensic Architecture / Forensis, 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

The People’s Court I (2025) is the first phase of a planned multi-year investigation into the transatlantic petro-extractivist complex, which occupies lands and communities across the ‘Transatlantic Forest Belt’ – a speculative term for a once-contiguous Pangaean forest, long ago divided into an ‘ecological diaspora’ by plate tectonics. The remains of this tricontinental forest span from the ancient sacred groves of the Niger Delta to the burial groves of Louisiana’s historically enslaved people.

It is well known that European colonists depleted West African cultural and natural resources alongside human populations. But a story less often told is how this historical looting presaged contemporary resource extraction, driving ecological collapse. Forensic Architecture/Forensis offer their visualisation tools to this story, entering through the 1897 sacking of the ‘Forest Kingdom’ of Benin by the British.

Contesting Western legal contexts in which testimony is an institutionally regulated and circumscribed act, The People’s Court I offers a form of transgenerational testimony that is immersive and emergent, evidentiary and generative. Through live and pre-recorded depositions, witnesses take the stand within evolving digital reconstructions of transatlantic ecologies that have been uprooted and eroded along the ‘continuum of extractivism.’

The People’s Court I (2025) premiered at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo from 6 September 2025 – 11 January 2026.