Extinction Claims


Design & production / Bygg Architecture & Design: Raphaël Coutin; Ivo Hulskamp

Special thanks to Corradino Garofalo


Commissioned by / Baltan Laboratories 
Date / Dutch Design Week 2021 
Location / Natlab, Eindhoven




In this project, Paolo Cirio combines the legal concept of “environmental personhood” with the “right of nature” jurisprudential theory, informed by climate change litigations, ecocide bills, and global climate treaties to give legal rights and protection to the natural world. Cirio aims to legally accuse the international oil, gas, and carbon companies that deliberately emitted over 70% of all greenhouse gases, causing extensive damage to Earth’s ecosystems and the species dependent on them for survival, all with the intention of covering up their crimes for decades.

Bygg translated this concept into the spatial design. The visitor enters into a wooden area that displays the 500 + cards each representing an endangered species. Each visitor, as a world citizen, can raise a claim and place it on the vertical panel. On the top of every panel a sprong is continuously dripping 'oil' onto the surface dripping down on the floor, until a point of no return?
Holding the light, a black pipe runs through the space and spits oil on the floor in front of the long list of Carbon Companies.