Bones of Contention: A Screening and Discussion with Filmmaker Andrea Weiss and Media Scholar Paul Julian Smith
Tuesday, April 17, 7pm

Please join filmmaker Andrea Weiss and Paul Julian Smith, Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, for a screening and discussion of Weiss’s recent film, Bones of Contention (2017).

Bones of Contention is the first nonfiction feature film to explore the theme of historical memory in Spain, focusing on the repression of lesbians and gays under Franquismo. Lining the roads of Spain, masked by miles and miles of pine trees, are unmarked graves in which over a hundred twenty thousand victims of the Franco regime are buried. 

The film weaves together two strands, the historical memory movement’s campaign to uncover the past, and the search for the hidden lives of lesbians and gays under Franco. These strands are connected through the figure of Spain’s most famous poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, who was killed by a right-wing firing squad in the first few weeks of the Spanish Civil War. The mystery of his missing remains and the debates over their significance provide the narrative spine of the documentary, as he has become the symbol today for both the historical memory movement and the LGBT movement.

The screening will be followed by a response from Paul Julian Smith, and a discussion with Andrea Weiss, moderated by María Edurne Zuazu.  Visit our website for more info.

Geofuturism, or learning to let go and love other worlds
a discussion of sociotechnical possibilities and life beyond fossil capitalism
Thursday, April 19, 7-9pm

Join us for the launch of Jesse Goldstein’s book Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism. Jesse will share a bit about his book, and then lead us through an interactive exercise and discussion about the many ways that our own sense of a good life is inextricably linked to unsustainable material and energetic flows. This is not meant to make us feel bad about ourselves, but to open up a collective imagining of truly radical possibilities for socially and ecologically vibrant futures.  Visit our website for more info.

Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map Preview
Saturday, April 21, 3pm

Every day in Brooklyn, over thirty unlicensed radio stations fire up their transmitters and take to the air. Historically known as pirates, they crowd onto an already packed FM dial, beaming transgressive culture-bearing signals into Caribbean, Orthodox Jewish and Latino neighborhoods.

At this event, radio producer David Goren will preview his Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map. Combining an interactive archival map with an audio-annotated essay, the Sound Map project explores the forces that drive these stations and the risks they take to remain on the air. Former pirate broadcaster DJ Cintronics will join David for a Q and A session. Visit our website for more info.

“The Women’s Strike Goes On” Screening and Discussion
Saturday, April 21, 6pm

Join us for a special screening of “The Women’s Strike Goes On”, followed by a discussion. Our panel includes Magda Malin, Organizer of International Women’s Strike Poland; and Rosy Clark, pre-school teacher member of MORE and DSA, and speaker at the Washington Square Rally for International Women’s Day NYC. This film depicts the history of female employees of public nurseries in Poznan, which in 2011 began to fight the marginalization of women’s work. Visit our website for more info.

From Below: Poetry and Social Justice
Thursday, April 26, 7-9pm

How do we make the world we want to live in? How does art help us re-imagine social and political reality? We want to answer these question by exploring the places where poetry and political activism intersect — and, maybe just as crucially, interrogating places where they don’t. From Below is a poetry and discussion series that aims to get this conversation started. Join us for our inaugural event featuring poets and disability rights activists Cyrée Jarelle Johnson and Jennifer Bartlett. Read more on our website.

Audio Interference 49: Ryan Wong and Basement Workshop

“All the messages from pop culture present Asian American as an apolitical thing. It was really shocking and liberating to find out that actually, Asian American politics was rooted in radical organizing and rooted in grassroots arts movements.” — Ryan Wong

This episode of Audio Interference focuses on Basement Workshop (active 1970-1986), an arts and political organization based in New York City’s Chinatown that served as a hub for the developing Asian American movement. Elena Levi speaks to curator and writer Ryan Wong, whose exhibition, Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York was presented at Interference Archive in 2013-2014. The episode also includes portions of Ryan’s talk at an event celebrating the release of the latest issue of Signal, a journal of international political graphics and culture. Listen on our website.

Listen to Audio Intererence on WRFU

Audio Interference--our podcast featuring interviews with the artists and activists who lived the history documented through Interference Archive--is excited to announce a new collaboration with WRFU 104.5 FM Urbana, a community-run station based at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center in Illinois. The UCIMC is a grassroots organization committed to using media production and distribution as tools for promoting social and economic justice in the Champaign County area. Episodes of Audio Interference will air on WRFU each week on Sunday nights, at 7:30pm Central Time (8:30pm Eastern Time).

La Lutte Continue…The Struggle Continues …Lotta Continua…La Lucha Continúa…
Exhibition Dates: April 29–May 26, 2018
Opening: Sunday, April 29, 2-8pm

An exhibition and event series about the 50-year-legacy of the global uprisings in 1968.

1968 was a time of explosive global protest. May ’68 might be synonymous with the general strike in France and the Situationists who inspired it, but mass uprisings and occupations that year reached every corner of the globe, with millions of people rising up to build power in pursuit of liberation on their own terms. From Italy to Mexico, from Japan to the United Kingdom, from the United States to Yugoslavia and well beyond, students and workers demonstrated in mass numbers, held strikes, and occupied their universities and factories. The state’s response to these anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist movements was one of brutal repression.

The composition, methods, goals, and achievements of these various movements were far from uniform, but often aligned. They centered on students and workers, rejected the old structures of unions and political parties, embraced intergroup solidarity and collective decision-making, and produced enduring art and propaganda. In studios and on the street, militants utilized time-honored methods of communication, but the generous use of screen printing by Paris’ Atelier Populaire [People’s Workshop] put the technique on the map as a key visual tool of global resistance movements.

The events of 1968 represent one of the last major instances of truly global protest. In the immediate aftermath, political structures and social relations transformed, and the uprisings’ successes and failures prompted, informed, and bolstered burgeoning feminist, LBGTQ, anti-colonial, and Black Power movements, setting the stage for the radical 1970s. Key tactics of liberation—and repression—were developed and shared in this period; fifty years on, the traces of 1968 remain visible in the battles still being fought today. 1968 speaks to the power of utopian visions to spur radical action, and to the necessity of reimagining what is possible.

Visit our website for more information.

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image: KingaNBM [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons