Armed Love: A Screening
Friday, June 29, 2018, 7:30–9:30pm

Interference Archive is excited to be screening the new short documentary, Armed Love, by Sean Stewart. The film is a meditative look at and conversation with Ben Morea about his role in the groups Black Mask and Up Against the Wall/Motherfucker. Ben will be present for a free-flowing discussion after the film.

“Walking through his former stomping grounds on the Lower East Side, Ben Morea charts the evolution of Up Against the Wall/Motherfucker—the network of action-oriented radicals, freaks, and street fighters that emerged out of the group surrounding the journal Black Mask during the late ’60s in New York City.” Visit our website for more info.

Our Comics, Ourselves Comic Book Club
Saturday, July 14, 10am-12pm

Do you read comics all the time and have insights you want to share and discuss with a group? Are you a critical thinker, and curious about the genre of comics? Join the Our Comics, Ourselves Comic Book Club! Each month we’ll select one or two comics or graphic novels to read, and then come together for an exploratory, critical, and spirited discussion at Interference Archive.

Comic Books to read for July 14, 2018 include Epileptic, by David B., and Gaylord Phoenix, by Edie Fake. One copy of each book will be on reserve at Interference Archive, and we do our best to select comics that are available in our public libraries. Questions? Email us at info@interferencearchive.org.

Visit our website for more info.

Audio Interference 52: SisterSerpents
“We were exploding and we were asking women all over to explode with us.”

SisterSerpents was a radical feminist art collective founded in Chicago in 1989. In this episode, we speak with Jeramy Turner, one of the group’s founders. She explains the history of SisterSerpents and how they used art as their weapon in the fight against women’s oppression. Visit our website to listen.

Audio Interference 53:
Appalachian Movement Press
“They saw this region as affected by a kind of colonial influence from the larger urban areas, sort of extracting resources from Central Appalachia historically, for over a hundred years, and not giving anything back.”

In this episode of Audio Interference, we’re looking into Appalachian Movement Press, an offset print shop and publishing house that was based in Huntington, West Virginia, from 1969 – 1979. We speak with Shaun Slifer, artist, writer, self-taught historian, and Creative Director & Curator at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, about his research into Appalachian Movement Press and about the identity movement in Appalachia in the 70s. Visit our website to listen.

Agitate! Educate! Organize!
Agit Prop in the 21st Century
Exhibition Opening: Tuesday, June 12, 6-9pm
Exhibition Dates: June 12 -- September 30, 2018

Our daily lives are saturated with information; we consume supposedly “neutral” media that implicitly supports existing power structures, yet we simultaneously fear “fake news” without critically analyzing the truths and biases that coexist in every message we see or hear. The reality is that all media has an agenda: for hundreds of years, people have used art, culture, graphics, performance, and design as central elements of social and political organizing across all realms of the political spectrum, to spread information and reimagine reality. This exhibition reflects historic and current uses of agitprop, or agitational propaganda, at the intersection of design and political organizing.

“Propaganda,” from the same root as “propagate,” refers to information that is shared in support of a cause. In modern times, the word propaganda has been weighted with negative connotations; we aim to reclaim the word and highlight the radical potential of propaganda to instigate change. With the Arab Spring, Occupy, Gezi Park, Black Lives Matter, #NoDAPL, and now the resistance to Donald Trump, we’ve seen a new explosion of agitprop. People of all stripes have come out into the streets, placards and banners in hand, wearing T-shirts and buttons, passing out flyers and stickers to protest social injustice. This boost of political ephemera hasn’t been created in a vacuum—since the advent of the printing press and movable type, political slogans and graphics have been part of our daily existence. Politicized communication is the constant accompaniment to people organizing to improve the lives of their families, communities, and co-workers.

Because so much attention is focused on organizing and activism, now is the perfect time to unearth and unpack the history of agitprop. Where does it come from? Who have been its major practitioners? How have the aesthetics and content evolved over time? And, how can we use it to change the world?