Tania Bruguera

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 participants with an inkless needle. This invisible tattoo, like the people who have been murdered, disappears from the skin after a short time.

When Tattooist Lu is not marking someone’s body with a name, cards can be read which hold the stories and names of each murdered person. 

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 751 people killed between 2015 and 2018, for actions interfering in state and company activities causing devastation to local environments. 

The tattoo serves as a way to embody and remember the lives of these people. 

In UNNAMED, participants have a selected name inscribed onto their bodies to personalise the data and to contrast the magnitude of these issues with the individual solitary reaction to them; you are only one person, only one member of the public, only human.