global witness
live performance, about 45 minutes long.
The organization Global Witness campaigns to end environmental and human rights abuses driven by the exploitation of natural resources and corruption in the global political and economic system. Their annual report on attacks on land and environmental defenders from 2018 revealed that 164 environmental activists were killed in 2018. Many of them were assassinated by corporations or governments. These people were simply defending their land, water, and air in their homes.
Reading about these activists made me mourn their collective loss from the world. Seeing all of their names together…there were just so many. I felt a deep connection like I needed to memorialize them. I also felt some guilt. I had been considering the idea of ethical justice, the practice of protest, and the idea that so many indigenous people are killed and martyred in the pursuit of capitalist economies and colonialist conquest. I can’t explain why, but I felt as though, as an environmental activist myself, I was not giving enough; I was not giving everything I possibly could to the cause.
In this piece, global witness, I wrote every one of the 164 names by hand on the gallery walls, using biodegradable oil-ink sticks. In the piece, I dragged a ladder around with me, climbed it, and crouched down, filling the walls as far as the confines of my physical body would allow, without stopping until I was done. Once I finished writing the names, I buried my reference list in a handmade body - bag filled with soil. This was my ritual of recognition and memorium. The viewer is made to be a participant in recognition, as the time it takes me to write the names forces the viewer to read each one slowly and recognize that each name is a person who was killed.
The book Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet, by Nina Lakhani is a deeper look into this issue.
“Because on the ground where Ate Glo’s (Capitan) body fell, where the blood from her body flows, more anti-coal activists will sprout. Instead of silencing us, it will only strengthen our convictions that the evil menace of coal must end. And we will persevere in this fight and see to it that our children and the children of our children will be free from it.” - Val de Guzman, speaking on the death of Gloria Capitán, an activist from the Phillipines.