Screening of What Farocki Taught and Conversation with Filmmaker Jill Godmilow
Saturday, September 8, 7pm

Interference is thrilled to host acclaimed filmmaker Jill Godmilow for a screening of her 1998 short What Farocki Taught, followed by an open discussion about agitprop film and its evolution throughout her career. This will be a treat for anyone who creates or consumes political media. Her feature film Far from Poland will also be screened at Interference Archive on Tuesday, September 11.

What Farocki Taught is a remake of German political filmmaker Harun Farocki’s astute 1969 agitprop film Inextinguishable Fire. Produced in Germany at the height of the Vietnam War, Farocki attempted to make the incomprehensible visible: the physical properties of Napalm B, designed to burn at 3,000 degrees F and stick to human skin. The film demonstrates the systematic impossibility of resistance to its production by Dow Chemical Corp employees and the inevitability of its use by the U.S. in Vietnam. Because Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire was never distributed in the U.S. and remains mostly unavailable to American audiences, Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught is a kind of film re-distribution, to see if the radical potential of the documentary project can be revived. Read more online.

Film Screening: Far From Poland
Tuesday, September 11, 7pm

In 1980, American filmmaker Jill Godmilow was coincidentally in Poland when a shipyard strike led to a social movement around the first independent labor union in a Soviet-bloc country. But when Godmilow tried to return to Poland to film, her visa entry was denied. In Far From Poland, she sets out to literally reinvent the documentary form by scrutinizing her original intention to make agitprop. The resulting film depicts the workers movement against the “workers state” and points to futures outside the absurd duality of the Cold War. Read more online.

Radical Press Fest
September 15, 12-5pm

You’re invited to an all-day festival of radical books, zines, prints, and more! “The Radical Press Fest” will bring together publishers working in different genres and on various scales to give a sampling of what radical publishing looks like.

Vendors include Common Notions, Radix Media, Justseeds, the Operating System, Interference Archives, Rebozo, Ink Cap Press, EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Program, and more!

Propaganda Party: Families for Safe Streets
Sunday, September 16, 2-5pm

Interference Archive and Families for Safe Streets (FSS) are excited to collaborate on an upcoming propaganda party to create materials for the World Day of Remembrance, commemorating lives lost in traffic crashes across New York City. Join us to make posters, memorial banners, buttons, and more. FSS is comprised of a group of individuals who have lost loved ones or have been injured in traffic crashes. Their mission is to channel grief into action and through grassroots campaigns, help realize a city where pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles safely co-exist. Read more info on our website.

Beyond the Good Muslim/Bad Muslim Binary: Understanding Islamophobia
Tuesday, September 25, 7-9pm

This interactive workshop with Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan asks participants to engage in and question the narratives that frame the way Muslims are talked about in the West. The workshop will use the British context to explain and ask questions about the way pseudoscientific narratives that stem from colonial times are used to justify today’s racist and dehumanising practices by the state in a range of ways. It asks us to consider Islamophobia beyond the individual’s prejudice or “phobia” and more broadly as a formally sustained and encoded way of thinking about certain people as less human than others, justifying systems and apparatuses of surveillance, the unmaking of citizens and (ironically) the jeopardisation of democracy and increasing authoritarianism that threaten’s everybody’s rights. Read more info on our website.

Keeping it Cool! Join us for our fall fundraiser
September 29, 2018, 4:00-9:00pm

Tickets are on sale now! You’re invited to Interference Archive’s (almost) annual benefit. Join us for a fun night filled with friends, refreshments, social movement history, and protest karaoke with Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere of Another Protest Song: Karaoke with a Message. Let's celebrate one year in our new home on 7th Street! There will even be special programming for kids in the first half of the evening, from 4-6pm.

Advance tickets are $20 for adults, $5 for kids between 6 and 16, and free for kids under 6. Tickets will be available for $25 at the door.

All funds raised go directly towards one of the most critical supporters of our 30,000+ collection of social movement ephemera–the AC Unit! We owe the final bulk payment on our central AC and we’re raising funds just for that. Our goal is $5,000. It’s really important for our collection to be in a cool, stable environment so that it can live on and be accessed by generations to come.

So join us, bring your cool vibes, and keep Interference Archive chill. There will even be a raffle–get your wallets ready! Read more info on our website.

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?