UNNAMED Installation Image

Tania Bruguera’s 'UNNAMED' is a series of participatory performances where participants choose the name of a person murdered or assassinated for their actions protecting the environment. Local tattooist Lu, whose practice focuses on botanical interests, will tattoo you with a traditional tattoo method using bamboo sticks. This invisible tattoo, like the people who have been murdered, disappears off your skin after a short time. The tattoo serves as a way to embody and remember the lives of these people. By marking the name of an individual killed through resource-related violence onto the body of another, the act of memorialisation becomes an intimate, person to person act, that seeks to personalise the ‘data’ that records this loss: approximately 753 people killed between 2015 and 2018, for actions interfering in state and company activities causing devastation to local environments.

The human cost as part of this on-going ecocide is rarely acknowledged or openly discussed. 'UNNAMED' is a means of marking each life individually and of viscerally registering this loss. When the performance is inactive, cards can be read and taken to share the stories of the assassinated ecological activists. This is to clarify that when the performances are taking place to not engage with the cards or the space.