ɛlsə-Land
Sovereign land, given back its inherent rights to itself, through an agreement for change of legal identity. (2019)
A land becoming a legal person through a created agreement document. The document is signed with land, previously owned by me. Elsa-land has been an important teacher and collaborator of mine since 2013. This place has shaped my work and research but has also been thoroughly shaped by the research. It has been a place for emancipating my work, by destituting its dependencies on fossil fuels and constituting its ecological dependencies. Elsa-land is an attempt to share, the "lived” and the “researched” forms of my research, forms indebted to “storied landscapes” and “land as pedagogy.
The document have been developed with generous feedback from Pia Björkstrand, Carmen Blanco Valer and the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. The document is free to use for anyone who wishes to make such agreements with land.