Systems of domination often operate by projecting human frameworks onto other sentient beings.
SILENCE IS VIOLENCE
From Femicide to Genocide
From femicide to genocide, violence against targeted groups is sustained not only through acts of brutality but through silence, denial, and the normalization of oppression. While genocide and femicide are distinct forms of violence, both emerge from systems that dehumanize, devalue, and render certain lives expendable. They are connected by patterns of domination, discrimination, and the abuse of power. Oppression anywhere is oppression everywhere.
Silence Is Violence brings these connections into dialogue through a single leaf transformed into a public act of witness. Created with hornworms guided by a hand-cut template, the work combines environmental awareness with social justice, linking violence against people with the exploitation, domination, and destruction of the natural world. The leaf serves as both a biological object and a political surface upon which questions of power, accountability, coexistence, and survival are made visible.
BugArtNYC rejects the imposition of human constructs such as "insect talent" onto nonhuman life. Doing so reflects the assumptions of human supremacy by interpreting nature through human values rather than recognizing it on its own terms. Instead, the work exposes the systems that normalize violence and challenges the silence that allows them to persist. #insecttalent is synonymous with coercion and rooted in oppression.
The hornworms are not presented as the artists. They possess neither intention nor symbolic understanding. They simply eat according to instinct, consuming only what the template allows. The artwork emerges through the intersection of natural behavior and artistic intention. Interpreting their behavior through human concepts such as talent, creativity, genius, or authorship imposes human values onto nonhuman life, obscures the actual relationships at work, and reflects the assumptions of human supremacy, measuring nature according to human desires rather than recognizing it on its own terms. The demand to patent or otherwise claim ownership over the underlying natural process reflects an ideology of human supremacy, extending human concepts of control, ownership, and exclusivity to relationships that exist independently of us. Human supremacy does not end with placing humans above other species; it also begins by assuming that human ways of thinking are the measure of all life.
The insects are not the subject of the work but the living medium through which broader questions of oppression, power, accountability, coexistence, and survival become visible. The message carried by the leaf is neither decorative nor sentimental. It embodies the voices of those who have been silenced, disbelieved, erased, or forgotten. It speaks to survivors of coercive control and violence against women, to victims of femicide and genocide, and to all whose lives have been diminished by systems that depend upon silence to survive.
BugArtNYC is an interdisciplinary art project that examines systems of oppression through the intersection of environmental awareness and social justice. While rooted in the lived realities of violence against women and coercive control, the work expands to examine broader structures of domination, including femicide, colonialism, genocide, human supremacy, environmental destruction, the public health consequences of oppression, and the devaluation of life.
Accountability begins with visibility. The telling of survivors' stories is essential to recovery, to dismantling stigma, and ultimately to prevention.
Silence protects perpetrators. Truth disrupts power. Accountability is prevention.
To conduct her study, Dr Jane Monckton Smith looked at all cases on the Counting Dead Women
- The 8 Stages of Homicide — how it plays out.
- Post Separation Abuse
- How Abusers Use DARVO To Escape Accountability
- Coercive control
- Concerning behaviors
- Types of Abuse
- CPTSD and PTSD
- Recovery
- Establishing coercive control as violence
- ACCOUNTABILITY IS NOT REVENGE, IT IS PREVENTION
Democracy Necessitates Resistance (w/ Roger Hallam) | The Chris Hedges Report
In his new book, Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion provides tools for effective resistance to climate collapse under repressive systems.
"In times of massive distress a society will fracture, along several key lines. One of them is towards internal destruction, personal suicide, nervous breakdown, domestic violence. Another fracture will go towards external hedonism, you know live now forget the future and another element will go into some form of collective cultlike behavior or some fascistic you know worship of death and what you know which is what fascism basically is. The last fracture will be the fracture that turns towards prophetic love of life and the human. It is naive to think that the others fractures won't exist."