Stand for Justice: Repeal Stand Your Ground
It’s been a dark week since the Zimmerman trial verdict, but the breadth of actions across the country is inspiring.
The hoodie continues to be a powerful symbol, with dozens of distributed events this week that include “million hoodies” or “hoodies up for trayvon”, etc. in their name. Countless people turn out in hoodies of different colors.
Looking at what’s already happening in the visual/symbolic landscape, Not An Alternative is producing more visuals that marry the hoodie to a demand: Stand for Justice, Repeal Stand Your Ground.
We’ve made a life-sized torso/hoodie stencil and cut coroplast to create figures that function as signs. They say “Stand for Justice” on one side and “Repeal Stand Your Ground” on the other (not depicted in images above). We’ve also sourced hoodies in different colors that we’ll screenprint to have both messages.
The online and offline visuals share an aesthetic vocabulary. As documentation of on-the-ground actions makes its way to mainstream and social media, the graphics and field photos can reinforce each other. Ideally, charging the symbol that exists in cultural consciousness and the media stream with a pointy-ended political demand.
In a lot of our work, bringing the excluded subject that isn’t present into the equation is something we aim for. In this case, representing Trayvon, but Trayvon as a collective subject, not just an individual. This collective subjectivity is represented by the cut-outs; the individual by the people in the demo wearing the different colored hoodies with the messages on them. And so, not trying to BE Trayvon or say that “we are all Trayvon”. (We like the “iamnottrayvon” tumblr for that reason). Because of Stand Your Ground there are many many Trayvons, most of whom we’ll never hear about.
From the Zapatistas to Super Barrio Man to Anonymous to Pussy Riot, anonymity plays an important role in social movements. The thousands of people who make the small gesture of giving up their individuality when they change their Facebook pics to a symbol in common, to an image of Trayvon Martin, embody an Idea.
The symbol of the hoodie asserts, in relation to justice, that we are not individuals. It doesn’t matter to whom the law commits an injustice, we must respond in the same way. It is said that ‘justice is blind’. This means that, if true, justice must apply to everyone equally.
We wear masks of de-individualization, of liberating anonymity, of Standing For Justice.
‘You cannot evict an idea whose time has come’. Or as the anonymous character behind the Guy Faulks (Anonymous) mask said in V For Vendetta, ‘Beneath this mask there is an idea… and ideas are bulletproof’.
You cannot kill an Idea!
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