Paolo Cirio engages with social, economic, and cultural issues of contemporary society. His interventions and research-based artworks are presented as installations, lectures, artifacts, photos, videos, and public art, both offline and online.
Cirio has exhibited in international museums and has won prestigious art awards. His artworks have been covered by hundreds of media outlets worldwide and he regularly gives public lectures and workshops at leading universities.
Paolo Cirio has won a number of awards, including Golden Nica first prize at Ars Electronica in Linz, 2014; Transmediale second prize in Berlin, 2006; Eyebeam Fellowship, 2012; and NEA grant at ISCP in NYC, 2017; among others awards
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 coal 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. This project issues requests to these firms for a financial reparation which is calculated by Cirio’s algorithm that integrates the economic concept of the “existence value” via contingent valuation combined with data on emissions from studies of “attribution science”.