Cartographies of Grief

This project extends Jasmina Cibic’s ongoing engagement with the politics of care and human rights advocacy, foregrounding the contradictions faced by international institutions in a moment marked by genocide and the erosion of legal and ethical frameworks. It turns to the current impasse of human rights action, exposing the dissonance between the aspirational language of treaties and the realities of global inaction.

For this work, members of the UN Human Rights Treaty Body on the Rights of the Child were invited to donate their tears—intimate, corporeal traces of the emotional and intellectual labour embedded in the defence of human dignity. These tears were photographed under a microscope, revealing crystalline formations that evoke planetary or topographic surfaces. Transferred onto etched brass plates, the images take on the appearance of suspended celestial bodies—distant, yet materially grounded.

Through this transformation, human rights are reframed not as abstract principles, but as embodied terrains—sites of continuous negotiation and vulnerability. The works resist monumentality, instead proposing speculative cosmologies: worlds constructed from the residues of care, the sediments of the unrealised promises of political frameworks.

Situated within Cibic’s broader practice—concerned with the intersections of culture, nation-building, diplomacy and ideological performance—the project confronts the failures of supranational ideals while insisting on the persistence of care as a form of resistance. It operates simultaneously as an act of mourning and as a proposition for world-building.