I have been walking the islands with a camera in hand since the first planting, in 2022. Most of the time I am not photographing trees — I am photographing what turned up on its own: a bumblebee on a flower, a paper wasp building, a ladybird on a leaf, a spider with its web strung between two branches, the insect hotel occupied. None of this was planted. It arrived because the conditions were there.
Those photographs became a shop: organic cotton t-shirts, sweatshirts and bags with illustrations drawn from the real images of the islands. And they come with a simple rule — for every piece sold, we plant two native trees or shrubs in the next island.
Two trees per piece
It is not a percentage of profit that nobody can verify. It is a unit you can count in the ground: two native trees or shrubs, planted in the next planting, alongside the other species, following the Miyawaki method.
The next one is in November 2026, at Sant'Lago School in Setúbal. Anyone buying today is buying trees that will go into the ground at that planting.
Every print comes from the same place
There is a difference between drawing a generic insect and drawing the insect that turned up in your island. Every print starts from a photograph with a date and a place — the bumblebee on the flower, the solitary bee, the honey bee in flight, the swallowtail, the ladybird, the insect hotel, and the aerial view of the mini-forest at the Lisnave shipyard in Setúbal.
The Lisnave mini-forest is the first Biodiversity Island in an industrial setting in Portugal, and it is where we measured an 11.2 °C difference between the asphalt and the inside of the vegetation. The print is the view from above of that patch of green in the middle of the shipyard.
SOLO: four islands, one word, one edition a year
There is a project inside the project. The word SOLO is not a typeface: it is four islands, one per letter, planted in the ground. It took two years to plant all four. Since then I go back every year and photograph them from above.
And the name reads two ways. In Portuguese solo means soil, the ground everything starts from. It also means alone — because that is how each of these forests begins: isolated, surrounded by concrete, asphalt or industrial land.
The four letters are four separate plantings. The S is the second island planted at the Lisnave shipyard in Setúbal. The first O is island number one, the very first of them all, also at Lisnave, in November 2022. The L is Escola Superior de Comunicação Social in Lisbon, with Noesis. And the second O is the island at the A5 motorway service station, with Capgemini and Brisa.
Each series of photographs gives a new tee edition, and it is always different from the last one — the trees grow, the canopies close, the green shifts. The print is the portrait of those letters in that year; once the year is gone, that image never repeats. It is a way of measuring growth that you can also wear.
A note on the images: the project logo is an original illustration and the word SOLO is made of real aerial photographs of the four islands — neither uses digital art. The remaining prints were drawn from my own photographs, with the help of digital image tools, including AI, but the starting point is always a real photograph taken in one of the islands.
Made after it is bought, then remade
The pieces are made in organic cotton and printed only after they are ordered — there is no stock and no surplus to destroy. At the end of its life, a piece can go back and be remade into new fabric instead of ending up in landfill.
It fits: it would be odd to fund plantings with clothing mass-produced and sent to landfill three years later.
Where to buy
The shop is in the site menu, under Shop. Checkout and shipping happen on the store platform, but the pieces, the photographs and the islands all come from here.
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