We Will Not Whisper
"We Will Not Whisper"
Mixed media installation with video projection
Plywood, plaster, graphite, single-channel video (4:16)
Work Statement
The wall is the first argument.
Plaster, applied in gauze-thin fragments over plywood and arranged in the pattern of brick, operates as a material proposition: something between architecture and skin, structural and perishable at once. Into each fragment, testimony is inscribed in graphite, the accounts of people directly affected by the policy agenda of Project 2025 and the legislative architecture surrounding it. A man taken by ICE the morning of his citizenship test. A Treasury Department employee of 22 years called "hunted and harassed." A teacher who says she still teaches history and will not stop. These accounts accumulate across the entire surface until the wall holds more grief than any single line can carry. No single testimony anchors the work. The accumulation is the argument.
A four-minute video projection plays directly onto this surface, its footage moving through sites of militarization, displacement, and civil resistance drawn from the current political moment. The projection lands on top of the handwriting, illuminating some words while casting others into shadow. Illumination and erasure operate through the same gesture, which is precisely how power manages the record.
The video carries two vocal texts. Saul Williams' A Toast to the People constructs an extended address to those whom extractive systems have long treated as expendable, its ceremonial accumulation of the named and the discarded building toward a collective reckoning that refuses elegy. The piece closes with Toni Morrison theorizing art as a site of danger, locating the artist as the figure against whom authoritarian impulses move against first, and framing the act of making work under those conditions as both ethical and necessary.
The plaster is fragile. The projection is temporary. The names remain.
Installation and Details of Piece
Poems shared:
"A Toast to the People"
By Saul Williams
A toast to all the people
whose lives mirror the stars
whose births and after futures
bring light to distant cause,
a toast to all extremities,
to wealth and all disease,
to burning fuel,
the burning pyres,
the burning tires, and trees.
A toast to the pollution,
the war of man versus beat,
The ignored truths of centuries recycled for a feat.
A toast to the free market, of liberty and dreams,
the value placed upon ideas, supplied, demand, and deed,
a toast to the landholders,
from sea to holy sea,
who benefit from monthly rent and dangle every key.
A toast to all the papers, sign, the contracts, wills, and laws, the bar exams, the shake of hands, the drugs, sticks, and straws,
a toast to all the losers who could not pay on time.
who lost their jobs, who lost their homes, and sometimes lost their minds.
A toast to those who lost their minds,
who never stood a chance,
whose wings were clipped, whose rights were stripped,
heard music, and they danced.
A toast to all the dancers,
who navigate through space,
who twist in turn,
who lessons learn,
when poets make their case,
A toast to all the poets,
who contemplate the wind,
whose life and breath may circle death, but never know an end.
A toast to the beginners,
who measure growth in steps,
who find the strength to go the length unhindered by each test.
A toast to all the teachers, who gift us with the tools,
To read between, discern and gleam, the timelines, and the news.
A toast to all the journalists,
who serve the weight of time, whose structure, phrase, the way it plays, and burrows in the mind,
A toast to all the scientists,
who seek the hidden cause,
amending all their findings until they chime its laws.
A toast to all musicians,
whose science rests in sound, intuitive decisions, whose heights and depths resound.
A toast to the resounding truths that ripple through the times that impact cultural ships and lifts the standards of design.
This is our town.
Transcript of Toni Morrison Sharing about Art
"I just want to, um, leave you with this thought. I think the... discussion we're having is about art and social policy. I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance, the history of art, whether it's in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators, and people in office. and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans.
And those people are idles. They're the ones that tell the truth. And it's something that the society has done to protect. But when you enter that field, no matter where you are, whether it's Sonya's poetry, or Toshi's music, or tanahisi's, you know, rather startlingly clear prose. Mm hmm. It's a dangerous pursuit. Somebody's out to get you. That's right. You have to know it before you start and do it under those circumstances, because it is one of the most important things that human beings do. That's what we do.
Details of Piece
A Selection of Video, Text & Cultural References:
Examples of Stories, Testimonials, and References On the Plaster Wall -
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I was three months into a cancer trial when the funding stopped. There was no warning. There was no plan.
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At least 383 NIH-funded clinical trials were interrupted by grant terminations between February and August 2025, per a JAMA Internal Medicine study. Many enrolled patients had no alternative pathway to the experimental treatment they had been receiving.
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They ordered the NIH to study how much trans people regret being themselves. That is not science. That is a political instruction.
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The White House ordered NIH to study the regret rates of trans people who receive gender-affirming care, which the Trump administration inaccurately describes as “surgical mutilation.”
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I drove nine hours because my state said my situation wasn’t an emergency. I was losing blood.
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With over a dozen states enforcing near-total abortion bans, patients experiencing pregnancy complications — including ectopic pregnancies and incomplete miscarriages — have been documented driving hundreds of miles across state lines for care.
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She left for Canada because she no longer believed a court would keep her safe. She was right to be afraid.
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Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia PhD student accused by DHS without evidence of being a “terrorist sympathizer,” left for Canada after her visa was revoked. Her peer Momodou Taal wrote: “I have lost faith that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety.”
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They fired the watchdogs first. I want everyone to know they fired the watchdogs first.
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The simultaneous firing of 17 inspectors general, gutting of the Office of Special Counsel, and reinstatement of Schedule F in the administration’s first days created a deliberate gap in oversight before major policy changes began.
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I logged on and the federal page with my health data was just gone. It had been there the night before.
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On January 20, 2025, dozens of federal websites, datasets, and health pages were taken offline — including LGBTQ+ health resources at the CDC, the Gender Policy Council site, and population health research. Many disappeared overnight.
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My healthcare was called ideological. I called it the difference between living and not.
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Executive orders directed federal agencies to stop funding gender-affirming care. HHS removed trans health resources. Researchers studying these treatments had grants canceled as “ideological.” The Pentagon reversed all transgender healthcare access.
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A judge said my arrest was like McCarthyism. The government appealed anyway.
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When ordering Mohsen Mahdawi’s release, Judge Geoffrey Crawford wrote that his arrest raised “a substantial claim that the government arrested him to stifle speech” and compared the administration’s tactics to the McCarthy-era political persecutions of the 1950s.
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The 9/11 first responders’ health program was cut. My father was there. He is still sick.
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The World Trade Center Health Program, which monitored and treated 9/11 first responders for cancers and respiratory diseases caused by the attack, was cut as part of broader HHS reductions in 2025.
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They fired the inspectors general on a Friday night. All seventeen of them. At once.
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On January 24, 2025 — a Friday night — the Trump administration fired 17 inspectors general across federal agencies simultaneously, removing independent oversight without the 30-day congressional notice required by law.
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They arrested him at his citizenship interview. The last step. He had been waiting ten years.
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Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian Columbia University student and green card holder for a decade, was arrested by ICE agents on April 14, 2025 at his naturalization interview in Vermont. What he was told would be a final step toward citizenship.
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The six masked agents surrounded her on the sidewalk. She was walking to break her fast.
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On March 25, 2025, Rümeysa Öztürk was surrounded by six masked plainclothes DHS agents on a Somerville, Massachusetts sidewalk as she walked to break her Ramadan fast. A bystander initially thought it was a kidnapping. She was flown 1,500 miles to a Louisiana detention facility.
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Examples of Clips and References in the Single Channel Video -
Iranian and American missle strikes in "Project Epic Fury"
Data centers
Genertaive Ai and oligarches
Protests in
Renee Good, in her car
Andrea Gibson,
Stills of Video
This work is a part of the exhibition "We Will Not Whisper."
The exhibition statement is as follows:
"The initial concept for We Will Not Whisper was conceived in early January 2025, when CNN published an article outlining Meta’s removal of hate speech polices across its social media platforms. Examples that werecited: women could be referred to as household objects or possessions, the LGBT community could be described as mentally ill, and people of color could be referred to as farm implements with no absolutely
repercussions.
As time passed, it became increasingly clear that it wasn’t just Meta that was breaking down protections for marginalized groups and institutions. The greater threat was coming from within the United States Government and those who are willing to destroy our constitution, laws, and freedoms to implement the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which fundamentally erodes the freedoms, protections, and way of life that a functioning democracy offers its citizens.
We Will Not Whisper is a visual reaction to the atrocities being committed by our 47th President, his Appointees and Elected Officials as the ideals we hold dear are being plundered and destroyed in service to a small group of self serving autocrats, technocrats and billionaires.
We stand together here as one voice, in a visceral and visual collective. By not acquiescing, complying in advance or whispering we not only empower ourselves, but we seek to empower others to protect not only those they hold dear, but freedom for all."