ABOUTIFUL, project notes
"Life's most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?" (M.L. King)
"What are you wearing for others?" (Aboutiful)
We have developed a project on what we can do to animate positive feelings in others through the garment that allows textual and visual language to express itself best: the t-shirt.
The project is called Aboutiful. We drew inspiration from the Summer of Love, from that summer at the end of the 1960s when freedom was confused with liberation: when rights were still called desires. The season of carefree idealism, when everything seemed possible.
The heart of our project is the 'rainbow heart', which we made by freely interpreting the rainbow flag created by Gilbert Baker in 1978, symbol of the homosexual liberation movement: we expanded the upper red stripe and contracted the lower strips to fit the perimeter of a heart.
The heart is the symbol of courage, of strength which is not just muscular strength because it is tempered by the intelligence of feelings.
The T-shirt is the thing that speaks closest to our skin and its closeness to our heart, to our nakedness, gives it sincerity. T-shirts are public underwear: they reveal what they cover.
The T-shirt is unisex and is a unifying factor. The difference between male and female is blurred.
Generational differences are also reduced: wearing a t-shirt represents the reappropriation of one's youth, of confidence in life and in others. A sort of time machine.
Our t-shirts are words that, together, would like to constitute a language that can be spoken by everyone to express a sensitivity that is independent of one's sexual orientation.
We wanted to play with words because play is the language-generating process, a language lives on the continuous recombination of its words until it becomes a neologism (the name of our project - Aboutiful - is a neologism).
There are words that share the same genetic heritage without our awareness: "listen" is an anagram of "silent". You can also be someone else while remaining yourself. The same applies to relationships between people as to the bonds between chemical elements: hydrogen and oxygen will never become water if they do not meet.
LeGalizeBeauTy, one of our textual short circuits, offers two readings: the first is the literal reading: the word "Legalisation" expresses a request for legal recognition and creates a surprise when placed next to a word that expresses a concept that has never needed to be approved: "Beauty"; the second reading is allowed by the LGBT acronym highlighted by the capitalisation of its letters.
We would like those who wear our tees to be able to express their sexuality or support of others with simplicity and fun, encouraging everyone to do the same.
But "putting yourself in the shoes of" we hope is the firststep towards a higher goal: identification, becoming the other. A gentle activism that leads us to empathy.
Our project starts from the "cure of language" to seek a "cure of thought", it is basically a method that through the recombination of textual and visual elements tries to highlight a reality that is invisible precisely because it is under everyone'seyes as the stolen letter of E.A. Poe.
It is an attempt to unmask words and symbols that are often used without awareness.
The aim is to instil courage (heart) and give love, which is the true creator of beauty, a chance by paraphrasing John Lennon's phrase pronounced during the "Bed-ins" in 1969 ("All we are saying is give peace a chance"): "All we are saying is give love a chance" eplacing the word peace with love.
