Today we got together at Meredith’s chapter room and made our own T-shirts. One by one, each white T-shirt was gracefully spray painted in gold by Myriam and we put our heads together to think of messages to write on our T-shirts. What kind of words would challenge the commodification of personal stories for the sake of advocacy? Each member in our group will be blogging about each T-shirt so please keep visiting our blog!
The message on my T-shirt is: “Am I a-wear-ivist?”
Wearivist was the initial word that I was about to paint, but then at a right moment Meredith made a great suggestion to combine the words – “aware” and “wearivist” – to question whether IC is aware of the fact that their T-shirt designs decontexualize the issue and also to question the knowledge of the consumers who wear around IC’s T-shirts.
I think it is essential to question the relationship between consumerism and advocacy. Stories of the people who experienced inhumane atrocities should not be treated as a material for a personal collection at a certain cost. Even if merchandizing the products can help spread more awareness about the conflict in Northern Uganda, there is so much about the human experience that cannot be understood through the branded products.
At back of the T-shirt, I painted some logos of facebook and twitter on one side and wrote Uganda on the other. I was thinking of painting a disconnected pathway from one side to the other to show that social media is currently not connecting the people in Northern Uganda and the United States. Then Caitlin said how about if I wrote “hello hello?” between the two sides. I thought that was amazing, because that reminded me of how our Skype interview with Jedidiah started with the exact same phrase. Will there be a time when the people in Northern Uganda can Skype chat with IC or the high school students who are eager to participate in IC’s projects?
I really like how our media team is so creative. Like really. I cannot emphasize it enough.
We are an artistic bunch!
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