Conferences and Talks

A Brief History of the Rights of Nature

Name: A Brief History of the Rights of Nature
Start: 2026-12-05T16:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-12-05T17:00:00+00:00
Location: Centro Cultural de Belém

Camille de Toledo

Dates / Schedules

Black Box

Approximate duration: 70 min

Dates / Schedules

Saturday, December 5, 2026 4:00pm

Free admission, with tickets available for collection at the CCB box office from 2pm (maximum 2 per person). Lecture in English.

Conference

Debate

Talk

In this lecture-performance, Camille de Toledo, artist, researcher and writer, presents what he calls “the global turn towards the rights of nature”. Drawing on a visionary text published in 1972 by legal scholar Christopher Stone, he examines how communities in different parts of the world have begun to recognise rights and, in many cases, grant legal personhood to natural entities such as rivers, lakes, forests and animal or plant species.

This transformation entails a profound shift in the narratives that shape our societies: the blurring of boundaries between subject and object, the emergence of new non-human protagonists and their entry into the legal sphere as entities endowed with rights and capable of being legally represented. A new narrative thus takes shape, in which natural entities, historically silenced or rendered invisible, come to occupy a place in the social, political and legal spheres.

The lecture-performance will be followed by a discussion with the audience.

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Workshop

Giving Rights to Nature
Camille de Toledo
December 3 and 4 from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen room
Target Audience: Artists, associations, researchers, teachers, educators, mediators and interested members of the public
Duration: 6 hours
Free admission, subject to registration via the online form or by email at inscricoes@ccb.pt.

Workshop in English.

Form

Biography

Camille de Toledo é escritor, artista, investigador e ativista pelos direitos da natureza. Doutorado e residente em Berlim, é investigador associado do Institute for Advanced Studies de Nantes (França) e do Kate Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CURE), em Saarbrücken (Alemanha).

É também artista associado do projeto «Internationale des Rivières», desenvolvido no âmbito da candidatura de Bourges a Capital Europeia da Cultura 2028, e da escola de arte Le Fresnoy, em França.

Data sheet

Photo: Camille de Toledo 1_©D.R

Partners

This programme is part of the CCB's collaboration with Évora_27 – European Capital of Culture and Bourges 2028 – European Capital of Culture.