Following the attacks on the creators of the controversial satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, the shootings at a debate on free speech in Copenhagen, the punishment of the rights activist and blogger Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, and the subsequent massive civil mobilisation, the cultural field is forced to process the significance of these events and their wider implications for our work. In Paris and many other instances across continents, representation itself came under attack. Arguably, the field of representation has been in crisis for some time, yet the current context demands that we consider this crisis from different perspectives and historical frameworks. L'Internationale Online has commissioned a series of short opinion pieces that comment on this complex situation in order to start a wider discussion from different cultural and geopolitical contexts.
The international initiative Agency's artistic contribution, Assembly (L'Internationale), reports on a legal case in Australia. An indigenous elder was charged with theft of the Australian Coat of Arms, while he claimed his action was in response to the fact that his people had never been asked for the right to use images of two animals that are sacred to them. His lawyer's attempt to transfer the case into the field of copyright law turned out to be unsuccessful.