ASHES WILL NOT TESTIFY—The Ones Who Weren’t Radical Enough

Ashes Will Not Testify: The Ones Who Weren't Radical Enough

A research-driven visual art project examining how environmental defenders are surveilled, prosecuted, and erased—and what material evidence remains.

Ashes Will Not Testify investigates the criminalization of environmental direct action in North America through material research and art-making. The project asks: when ecosystems collapse and governments acknowledge the crisis, why are those who act to defend the environment targeted as extremists?

Drawing on legal documents, surveillance records, media coverage, and activist archives, the project traces a decades-long pattern of state repression—from the "Green Scare" prosecutions and targeting of the Earth Liberation Front to contemporary legal repression of Indigenous land defenders and climate activists. Rather than documenting these histories through narrative or heroic imagery, Ashes Will Not Testify works through material residue: redacted documents, charred wood, soil, ash, and fragments of industrial and natural systems.

The resulting mixed-media works—collage, sculpture, installation, and printed matter—emphasize accumulation, erasure, and what remains after repression. Dense layered surfaces function as visual evidence, creating encounters with suppressed histories through tactile and spatial experience rather than didactic explanation.

Developed as part of the Convention Collective Agreement's 2025–2026 cycle exploring Labour and the Environment, the project reframes radical ecological action as a form of labour: high-risk, often invisible, physically and emotionally demanding, and routinely devalued or violently suppressed. By connecting environmental defense to questions of workplace safety, bodily risk, and extractive economic systems, Ashes Will Not Testify asks how responsibility and protection are distributed when the planet itself becomes a site of contested labour.