In researching the Silence=Death Project, I learned that the Nike corporation employed this now iconic queer activist graphic on sneakers and apparel as a central feature of their 2018 Pride Month-themed collection known as BeTrue. After being called out on Twitter, Nike arranged to donate part of their proceeds from the BeTrue line to Act-Up and other LGBTQIA rights organizations. Nike had not reached out to Act-Up prior to this social media backlash. In this print, I’m imagining the Nike product development meetings in which their shoe design concept was conceived. The composition is meant to resemble the user interface of a sneaker shopping website, with customizable colors, emblems and shoe sizes. The triangle graphics reference a 1936 chart illustrating the prisoner coding system in the Dachau Nazi concentration camp.

The activists involved in the Silence=Death Project had a reason to isolate the pink triangle used to signify homosexual prisoners. They ignored the triangles pertaining to other interned groups in order to focus public attention on the dire condition of the AIDS epidemic. In the dark dream of this print, Nike designers are considering including the triangle badges of identities left out of the 1987 project, such as political prisoners, emigrants, Jehovah’s witnesses, Romani people, Jewish people, and pacifists. I am contemplating the commodification of horror and what it means to appropriate something that itself was an appropriation of an image of abominable brutality.