MAYBE I SHOULD EXPLAIN SOME OF MY TEES

Ideas are so weird, a little niggling thought in your brain that you have to tease out, you can’t pull at it, you have to wiggle it out slowly. You can move it in different directions, encourage it, but it really only fully forms in its own time. This month I wanted to constrain myself to releasing a ‘Year of the Horse’ tee, but my mind was always drifting to the awful scenes in Iran as people protest against the islamic republic, the brutal regime has killed innocent people in their thousands. Many women targeted for acting as free sovereign human beings. In America we are seeing people being murdered on the streets by ICE agents, like Renee Good who was just trying to support her neighbour. We are seeing hundreds of women voices silenced, only partially believed when a dead mans file is fully released. Its hard to design when everything is so negative.

I was sat around my brothers house whilst my niece Frankie was looping around and around the kitchen on her new wheeled toy horse, she mesmerises me as her energy is like no other, fiercely independent, master of her own mind, comedically ruthless as well as being consumed by empathy. My mind slowly remembered a trip to Rouen late last year, we were at the site where Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake. My half empty mind is always looking to get filled so I found out who she was and why they burnt her alive. The link from Frankie and the toy horse and Joan of Arc, was that she was hardly ever seen apart from her horse, weird how your brain joins misaligned dots. Im sure though that Joan would see herself in Frankie and vice versa.

Joan of Arc, who at sixteen she leads French forces against the English occupiers in Northern France in the Hundred Year War, pushes them back with decisive victories. Fulfilling her divine mission. Later at nineteen she was captured by the British, tried in a sham trial accused of heresy and wearing mens clothing and is burnt at the stake, becoming a martyr and later a saint. Her spirit, her resistance, her tenacity, her empathy, her faith runs through all the women we see standing up to the corrupt and evil people pulling the global strings of society. It is these voices we need to hear and nurture to make sure the world becomes as beautiful as it can be.

Locally in our ‘Jungle’ community I’m reminded and couldn’t be prouder of the strong women we have pushing the scene and making room for everyone. Shout out Kemi, Storm, Chickaboo, Deeizm, Jenna G, Tali, AlleyCat, Flight, Ayah Marar, Diane Charlamagne, Dazee and many more who pioneered the female movement in the scene early doors, none of them fully getting the credit they deserve but knowing they have inspired the likes of Becky Hill, Charlie Tee, Mollie Collins, Riyah, Collette Warren, Lens etc etc etc etc who have all turned the scene on its head. Shout out to Nathan X and Mandidextrous who have put queer DnB on stages it had never been before. These people, this spirit is the light against the dark in our uncertain times. Regardless of century their will always be brave, strong women who fight oppression, stand up to bullies and change the course of the future to better places and times.

This t-shirt is in equal parts a protest tee and a celebration tee, in the words of Joan of Arc ‘One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying’.

La Femmes de la Jungle.