Keeping it Cool! 
September 29, 2018, 4:00-9:00pm

Join us for Interference Archive’s (almost) annual benefit -- 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! 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.

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.

Interference, Absurdity, Performance, and Political Change: A Workshop Series
Thursdays 7-9pm, September 27-October 18

In this series of (no)work(no)shops, we will collectively discuss ‘the absurd’, how this intersects with political action and performance, and how this relates to the specific context of New York City in 2018. Drawing from a selection of readings and materials from Interference Archive, we will learn about historical and contemporary absurdist/anarchist/dadaist/ni hilist/(t)errorist political performance. Following these explorations, we will build new transgressive, anti-normative characters and creatures and conspire in the creation of new performances and disruptions. Read more on our website; email with RSVPs or questions.

Silvia Federici: Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women
Sunday, September 30, 5-7pm

Join Common Notions and Silvia Federici in the launch of her latest book Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women.

In this new work that revisits some of the main themes of Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici examines the root causes of a new surge of interpersonal and institutional violence against women, including new witch hunts. This surge of violence has occurred alongside an expansion of capitalist social relations.

Federici outlines the consequences for the women affected and their communities. She argues that, no less than the witch hunts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and the “New World,” this new war on women is a structural element of the new forms of capitalist accumulation. These processes are founded on the destruction of people’s most basic means of reproduction. Like at the dawn of capitalism, what we discover behind today’s violence against women are processes of enclosure, land dispossession, and the remolding of women’s reproductive activities and subjectivity.

As well as an investigation into the causes of this new violence, the book is also a feminist call to arms. Federici’s work provides new ways of understanding the methods in which women are resisting victimization and offers a powerful reminder that reconstructing the memory of the past is crucial for the struggles of the present.

This event is free and open to the public. Read more on our website.

Agitate! Educate! Organize!
Agit Prop in the 21st Century
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.

Free Education! The Free University of New York, Alternate U., and Learning Liberation
October 11, 2018 – January 27, 2019
Opening reception: October 11, 2018, 6-9pm

Rooted in an examination of the history of the Free University of New York (FUNY), a 1960s experiment in radical education, this exhibition and event series reflects on the questions: What is a university? What does the university have that we want? What does the university have that we don’t want? How would a university look if we could build one from scratch?

By combining original archival documents from FUNY as well as from related projects, including Alternate U. and the Freedom Schools movement, this exhibition explores what it means to have a space for community at the intersection of art and politics, and how we generate history together through our work in these community spaces. Read more on our website.