Give the t-shirts to the people!

Polis means city in ancient greek and is one of the first form of socially conscious urban territory. We are interested in how ideas can be embodied. Literally. How do you wear a t-shirt that says something? Where are the spheres of communication surrounding the clothes you wear?

People tend to pick up mottos, have 'philosophies'. They relate to an environment they think they chose, but the very choice of that environment is influenced by an ensemble of peculiar social determinations. They pick up codes that filter reality, and that forge their identity in relation to the rest of the world, but often only the people who have picked up the same codes can understand this identity. They build up communities, and then they start a war. Rituals, from idiosyncrasy to populism, is what shape discourse. Reading and being read is what drives our speech.

The polis t-shirt culture materializes these dynamics of social textualities.

That is why the culture of polis t-shirts has a lot to do with advertisement: how much can you gain in symbolic value from wearing a t-shirt? Sure you can lose a little - you can be arrested in a mall because it is "not a public space" and your ideas are infringing on the corporate interest of the mall. But the insurances cover for that. You will be paid back in symbolic value by the diffusion of your face/name/story in the news. You establish a territory of soft activism, just like the kid maps the boundaries of his territory when walking down the streets of his neighborhood with his "straight edge" t-shirt.

The main idea of producing t-shirts is to work on the idea of slogan and of social sphere. The commercial idea of maximum effect is a powerful rhetorical tool that activist groups have taken into account to non-commercial ends. Both work on language as an impact, as an expressive means (i.e., in linguistic theory terms that target someone in order to make another react).

We intend to duplicate this phenomenon in a critical way by using the "detournement" method. That is, by trying to extract analytically the main features of the phenomenon and use them in a diverted way . The functionality of the culture will be more or less modified.

Inventing a brand and designing a series of t-shirts that have a coherent (more than relevant) meaning that they express through striking images and words. Here the diversion consist in working on the idea of critical slogan.

Finding a space in which to act. We have chosen to distribute our t-shirts for almost nothing in a thrift-store. The diversion here concerns the space. This particular space is supposedly a neutral one: a thrift store is a space where you driven into by necessity or by the will of not getting into the logics of money-spending and/or brand-endorsing.

Mapping a territory of social reaction. Each t-shirt will be tagged with this website url. The person who has bought the t-shirt will be directed to our website. On this website the person will be welcomed by 2 questions: Where do you live? How do you react to the t-shirt design? This collected data will be processed in order to make a dynamic map, thanks to Google Map API.