Of Liberty and Lebensraum: The Legal Aesthetics of Expansionism

In a world beset by problems, one achievement that is rarely questioned is the success of this world - at last - in bringing virtually every one of its now nearly eight billion human beings at least nominally within the framework of democracy and the rule of law. And yet somehow, the fewer the categories excluded from this frame (people of colour, women, Indigenous peoples, gan and trans people, etc), the more these institutions appear to foster a politics that is predicated on their destruction. Why do horrifying episodes of racist, often genocidal violence, continue to break out so regularly? Is this simply a problem of enforcement — of the violation of rights that, if respected, would deliver a world of true equality and freedom? Or is there some hidden cost associated with the ‘choice’ of once excluded actors to fit themselves inside a frame that was originally constructed by and for someone else? This chapter brings a series of artworks and episodes into conversation, including one the one hand, the Four Freedom collective’s ‘re-staging’ of Norman Rockwell’s 1943 quadriptych (2016), Boccioni’s Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (1913) and Allora, Guillermo and Chiang’s The Great Silence (2014), and on the other, the Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, ongoing since October 2023, to the storming of the Capitol by supporters of then-outgoing US President Donald Trump in January 2021 and appropriation, between 1890 and 1896, of vast tracts of land in present-day South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe by the British diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, in the attempt to take this picture off the wall and dismantle the frame.