Audio Interference 50: Center for the Study of Political Graphics

“It’s like we’re always reinventing the wheel, but some of these posters tell you what worked and what didn’t work a generation ago or more.” – Carol Wells

The Center for the Study of Political Graphics, based in Los Angeles, is home to a collection of over 90,000 protest graphics and the largest collection of post World War II posters in the United States. In this episode, Carol Wells, Founder and Executive Director of CSPG, gives a tour of the archive to Kevin Caplicki, one of the co-founders of Interference Archive and a member of Justseeds Artist Cooperative. Listen now!

Feminist Urbanism
Wednesday, May 2nd, 7-9pm and Saturday, May 5th 3-6pm

As New York City becomes increasingly polarized and unequal, displacement and lack of opportunities have become daily struggles for most of its dwellers. Within this context, various resistance practices attempting to conceptualize alternative forms of producing and appropriating space have been working to reclaim our Right to the City. How can we develop an urban experience through a feminist lens? The goal of this two-part workshop is to create a collective definition of Feminist Urbanism using Interference Archive´s material.

Wednesday, May 2nd, 7-9pm
During the first session, we will discuss texts on urban theory, urban development, and feminist perspectives on space as a product of intersecting social relations, the creation of the commons, and the capitalist organization of work.

Saturday, May 5th 3-6pm
On the second day of the workshop, we will review a selection of feminist manifestos from artists and feminist radical groups, as well as pamphlets from Interference Archive´s collection. Following that, we will start drawing the boundaries, principles and key aspects that define Feminist Urbanism, to create a collective entry in Wikipedia.

NOTE: We recommend that attendees complete the readings for the discussion before the workshop. Please email info@interferencearchive.org to RSVP and get the readings.

Archive That Comrade! Left Memory Politics, Toxic Fame, and the Populist Archive
Thursday, May 10, 7-9pm

“Don’t mourn, organize” was a favoured campaign slogan of the old Left, part of its commitment to struggles of long duration against social injustice and a belief in the ultimate triumph of socialism. But with the rise of identity politics, the importance of memory work–of recording and celebrating hitherto hidden and ignored life histories–has been widely recognized along with a nostalgic tendency in some quarters to mourn the “world we have lost” where working class culture, tied to the labor movement, was a major and progressive political force. Are the do-it-yourself archival practices of the Me Too generation an effective tool for building a shared sense of culture and community in which feelings of anger and loss can be addressed, so that grief does not have to be sublimated in grievance?

This discussion with author Phil Cohen will address these questions by looking at recent controversies surrounding public memorials, monuments, and archives in both the UK and United States and by arguing for an alternative democratic politics of the archive. Visit our website for more info.

May 1968 – May 2018
May 12, 2018

Join us for a day-long gathering looking at the impact of the global uprisings of 1968 on our lives and communities in 2018.

12–1pm
Student activists and others will be doing a performative reading of On the Poverty of Student Life, a key Situationist text which helped launch the 6-week student and worker revolt in France, May 1968.

1:30–5pm
A series of organizers and historians will be discussing the international activities of 1968.

6–10pm
Screening of Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge [A Grin Without a Cat] (Chris Marker, 1977, 240 min). This sprawling essayistic film is a key document collecting footage from over a dozen countries in from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, and is one of the best windows into the meanings and impacts of 1968.
Visit our website for the full schedule of events.

Situationist Speakeasy
Friday, May 18, 7-10pm

Come join Interference Archive and Common Notions Publishing for themed drinks and snacks while we watch détourned and Situ-films, including Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (René Viénet, 1973), Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord, 1973), and more. Visit our website for more info.

The Sounds of 1968
Tuesday, May 22, 6:30–9pm

A journey into politicized sound! Collective listening and discussion of vinyl records produced by and documenting 1968 movements, with music, experimental sound, field recordings, and radio reportage. Visit our website for more info.

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.