(Blurred faces for privacy reasons)
Memorial shirts ‘have the ability to act as conversation pieces, which is one of the essential functions of the memorial T-shirt—to allow death to enter the conversation.’
‘Virtual Aftertlives. Grieving the Death in the Twenty-first Century’ Candi K. Cann, 2016
GOTS-certified ecofriendly screenprint on organic cotton and fair longlsleeves.
On Sunday August 18, 2019, Iceland held an official memorial ceremony for their glacier called Ok, formerly known as Okjökull (Ok-glacier), the first glacier declared dead due to climate change. This memorial shirt intends to spark a discussion about the death of nonhuman entities caused by human influence on the environment.
Memorial Shirts for Non-living Entities is exploring image and sense making in times of planetary crisis through fashion. It focuses on the devastation brought about by the unfolding climate change across the globe, not directly highlighting the human, animal or vegetal price of such a crisis. It rather zooms to a bigger scale, to tell the untold stories of dying glaciers, mountains, lakes and reefs – to mourn and remember such entities, and spark discussions over the effect of this human-made crisis on the physical world around us. Memorial shirts are a modern version of traditional mourning clothing. They are not limited to any formal codes and appear in different aesthetics, yet they are immediately recognisable as bereavement clothing by their images, text phrases and symbolism.
