Agitate! Educate! Organize! Agit Prop into the 21st Century

Exhibition Dates: June 12 — September 30, 2018
Exhibition Opening: Tuesday, June 12, 6-9pm

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.

Disruption: a podcast listening party with Willie Mae Rock Camp

Thursday, June 7, 6-8pm

Join participants from the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls Arts & Activism program at this podcast listening party to celebrate the work they’ve produced this year. These podcasts look at ways that participants want to ‘Disrupt!’ various systems; join us to diginto everything from colorism in communities of color, the Japanese idol industry, the role of white people in fighting racism, and so so so much more…!

Our Comics, Ourselves Comic Book Club

Saturday, June 9, 12-2pm

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 our 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.

This month we’ll discuss Black AF: America’s Sweetheart, by Kwanza Osajyefo and The Hookah Girl and Other True Stories, by Marguerite Dabaie

Film Screening: My Country Occupied

Wednesday, June 13, 7pm

Join us for a screening of My Country Occupied (Newsreel #151, 1971, 30 minutes), with filmmakers Tami Gold and Heather (Lewis) Archibald. In this moving film, the personal testimonies of Guatemalan Indians, peasants, and guerrillas are dramatized to provide the narration for a powerful overview of the history of U.S. destabilization of democracy in Central America.​ ​This screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. 

Audio Interference 51: Adjunctification at CUNY

“Adjunctification is really this process of replacing full time academic positions with part time academic positions at lower wages and usually inferior, if any, benefits as a cost saving measure.”

Radical Discipline: Exploring the Reasons Children Are Punished, and Alternative Suggestions

Saturday, June 16, 2018
3pm-4:30pm

RESCHEDULED FOR JUNE 16: Radical Playdate presents an open and personal caregiver discussion about disciplining and punishing children—is there ever a need to punish children? How were we punished as children, and what repercussions did that have on us? What are some alternative models for punishment that we can employ as radical caregivers? To frame our discussion, China Martens has generously shared an issue of her exploratory zine on radical parenting, The Future Generation #5, Part II: Discipline. Download it here.

Social Justice Book Club

Sunday, June 24, 2-4pm

Join the Social Justice Book Club for a discussion on Roxane Gay’s searing memoir, Hunger. Hunger builds on Gay’s writing about feminism, women’s bodies, and rape culture to unflinchingly tackle personal experiences. Hunger is about weight gained and lost and gained. It’s also about so much more: the body she built to shield herself from the contempt of men and her own sense of shame, her complex relationship with parents who took great interest in solving her weight “problem,” and what it has meant for her to be highly visible and yet feel unseen. Please RSVP if you’d like to join us.

From Below: Poetry and Social Justice II

Thursday, May 31, 7pm

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 Interference Archive for a public reading and discussion on intersections of poetry and labor organizing with Mark Nowak of the Worker Writers School, members of Retail Action Project, and local community college students and retail workers. The reading will be proceeded by a writing workshop for local community college students who work in retail or service industries.

Weed and Seed Walk with Next Epoch Seed Library

Saturday, June 2, 2pm

The Next Epoch Seed Library has reimagined your typical seed bank in the face of climate change; their library collects plant species that live in close association with humans, but that have not been planted or maintained purposefully; in short, weeds! Join Interference Archive and the Next Epoch Seed Library on Saturday, June 2nd for an afternoon weed walk through Gowanus. Interested in walking with us? RSVP to info@interferencearchive.org so we can share details on our starting point for the walk.

An Agitprop Scavenger Hunt

Tuesday, June 5, 7-9pm

Our upcoming exhibition, Educate Agitate Organize!, looks at several different facets of the creation of agitprop. One thing we’re excited to explore is the way that the same symbols are reused across time and place by various movements, as acts of solidarity, as a way to create identity, and to communicate similar or disparate messages. We want you to help us explore this! Join us on June 5 for an agitprop scavenger hunt. We’ll give you a short list of symbols to hunt for, and we’ll provide an orientation on how to find material in the archive. Then it’ll be your turn to explore and see what you can find!

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

La Lutte Continue…The Struggle Continues …Lotta Continua…La Lucha Continúa…

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.

The Sounds of 1968

Tuesday, May 22, 2018
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.

Archive That Comrade! Left Memory Politics, Toxic Fame, and the Populist Archive

Thursday, May 10, 2018
7pm

Author Phil Cohen and participants will look at recent controversies surrounding public memorials, monuments, and archives in both the UK and United States in order to discuss how far “the archive” can serve as a platform for dialogue and debate between different generations of activists in a culture that fetishizes the evanescent present, practices a profound amnesia about its past, and forecloses the sociological imagination of an alternative future?

May 1968 – May 2018

Saturday, May 12, 2018
12–10pm

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

Situationist Speakeasy

Friday, May 18, 2018
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.

Mayday Propaganda Party

Sunday, April 29, 2018
2–6pm

Join us on the Sunday before Mayday for a Propaganda Party featuring militant 1968 graphics revamped for contemporary struggles. We’ll be screenprinting, block-printing, sign making, and button making. Bring ideas, shirts, fabric for patches, and anything else you want to contribute.

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

Bones of Contention: A Screening and Discussion

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. Today the families of the desaparecidos lead a grassroots effort to uncover and identify the bones of their loved ones, despite opposition from the Spanish government.

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.