Join us for a multimedia performance lecture by Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos from the University of Westminster. Our guest will explore the idea of spatial justice through video, text, and interaction with the audience.
Performing Spatial Justice
There can be no justice that is not spatial. Against a recent tendency to despatialise law, matter, bodies, and even space itself, I insist on spatialising them, arguing that there can be neither law nor justice that are not articulated through and in space.
Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
This multimedia performance lecture is based on the book Spatial Justice. The book presents a new theory and a radical application of the material connection between space—in the geographical as well as sociological and philosophical sense—and the law, understood in the broadest sense that includes written and oral law, but also embodied social and political norms. More specifically, it argues that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies—human, natural, non-organic, and technological—to occupy a certain space at a certain time. Spatial justice, therefore, can be found in the core of most contemporary legal and political issues, such as geopolitical conflicts, environmental challenges, animality, colonization, droning, and cyberspace. In order to show this, the book employs the lawscape, as the tautology between law and space, and the concept of atmosphere in its geological, political, aesthetic, legal, and biological dimension.
The performance uses video, text, interaction and other elements in order to produce an atmospherics of control as well as freedom. It goes through issues of lawscape and spatial justice and involves the audience in a game of senses and movement.
About the lecturer
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Professor
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is an academic, artist, and fiction author. He is Professor of Law and Theory at the University of Westminster and Director of the Westminster Law & Theory Lab. His academic books include the monographs
Absent Environments (2007),
Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society (2009), and
Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (2014). His short story collection
The Book of Water (2023) and his novel
Our Distance Became Water (2024) are published by Eris. His art practice includes performance, photography, text, sculpture, and painting. His work has been presented at Palais de Tokyo, the 58th Venice Art Biennale (2019), the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2016), Tate Modern, Inhotim Instituto de Arte Contemporânea (Brazil), Arebyte Gallery, and Danielle Arnaud Gallery. He has performed extensively in academic and artistic institutions worldwide. For more information, visit
andreaspm.com
Organizer
Date and location
October 27, 2025
SWPS University in Warsaw, Chodakowska 19/31, room N314