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Beyond the Sky’s Limits

‘In the human design and use of weapons, natural elements are harnessed and deployed as a destructive technology. In this engineering, there is a break, fissure, and crack whereby the human and non-human entity, having been elastic, on impact becomes plastic, and forever changed from its original self.’

Helene Kazan


27 mei 2024 • 1 min

Screenshot from the film showing the calm shoreline situated close to the International Criminal Court (ICJ) in the Netherlands. Frame of Accountability, 01:00:00, Helene Kazan, 2024.

The film chapter ‘Beyond the Sky’s Limits’ narrates law as a consciousness coming to terms with its own failings: the speculative voice of a feminist, queered, decolonial international law. Unravelling this complex non-human subjectivity, it narrates the drafting of the Rules of Air Warfare in 1923. A filmic study of the legal archival document reveals how these international laws of war become corrupted by the self-interest of the strong states and colonial powers involved in their making: their ambitions fail quickly and critically.

This is part our of series on 'documents' in collaboration with the-documents.org. Read the introduction here.

Helene Kazan is an artist, writer and educator. Her work investigates ‘risk’ as a lived condition produced through the conjoined violent effects of capitalism and conflict. This is observed in the colonial roots of international law and its material formation of the lived-built environment. In response, she uses decolonial, feminist, poetic and critical-legal approaches in her work, which explores ways of dismantling the ongoing effects of neo-colonial violence towards wider frameworks of accountability and justice.

  • Documents