Armed by Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL)
Interference Archive, Lani Hanna, Jen Hoyer, Josh MacPhee, Vero Ordaz, Sarah Seidman
In the spirit of OSPAAAL, Armed By Design is available in four languages (English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish). The book totals nearly 400 pages and includes over 200 full-color reproductions of OSPAAAL designs, including a visual index of their publication covers as well as dozens of their posters.
Printing a book like this is expensive, but it remains crucial to stay true to its politics throughout the entire publishing process and ensure language and economic accessibility for readers.
To support the production of Armed By Design, visit the BetterWorlds Campaign HERE
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To support the production of Armed By Design, visit the BetterWorlds Campaign HERE /
A stunning full-color, multilingual exploration of the profound graphic and intellectual legacy of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) for internationalism, solidarity, communication, and art among movements today
OSPAAAL developed out of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, a meeting of delegates representing national liberation movements and leftist political parties almost exclusively from the Global South. Based in Havana, OSPAAAL produced nearly five hundred posters, magazines, and books beginning in the late 1960s, with most of their work ceasing by the late 1980s. Until 2019, OSPAAAL was a political organization focused on fighting US imperialism and supporting liberation movements around the world through poster production, regularly produced publications, and a series of books featuring the writings of the intellectual leadership of these movements.
Armed By Design brings together artists and thinkers from around the world whose work has been impacted by the legacy of OSPAAAL. These contributions reflect on impacts of OSPAAAL’s work on regional movements, including in the Arab world and Korea, design iconography, the evolution of tricontinentalism, our present-day relationship to OSPAAAL posters as a commodity, and authorship and reproduction.
This full-color multilingual edition includes ten international contemporary political poster-makers, artists, and designers commissioned to produce OSPAAAL-inspired prints in solidarity with today’s movements: Friends of Ibn Firnas (USA), Yuko Tonohira (Japan/USA), Ganzeer (Egypt/USA), Un Mundo Feliz (Spain), Steven Rodriguez (USA), Dignidad Rebelde, Tomie Arai (USA), Sublevarte Colectivo (Mexico), Jamaa Al-Yad (Lebanon/Worldwide), and A3CB (Japan).
PRODUCT DETAILS
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While we’re excited to foster more conversations about the legacy of OSPAAAL, this project has also been an opportunity for us to experiment with the method and practice that OSPAAAL followed in their publishing work. While their headquarters in Havana generated an impressive level of content, they also partnered with printers and publishers in other parts of the world to generate other language editions and to print for foreign distribution.
When setting out on this project, we asked ourselves: how can the practice of publishing with others be a way to build political solidarity? To explore this, we’ve developed relationships and connections through el rebozo editorial and tumbalacasa ediciones in Mexico and sobinfluencia edições in Brazil, as well as individuals in Québec and France, to have translate and copyedit all content into four languages. This has been an opportunity to ask ourselves: what does political translation look like? How do we collaborate on projects across contexts that have wide resource disparities? How do we continue conversations about OSPAAAL in a way that builds on their commitment to liberation?
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Printing something like this is expensive, but it’s also an opportunity for us to think about how solidarity is part of the economics of our project. Our goals right now are: (1) to make this book available to readers across North America at a price that is affordable to them, and (2) to make this book available for our publishing partners in other countries to print and distribute at a price that is manageable for their local markets.
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Preorder your own copy for a discounted price of $35; preorders will ship on December 1, 2024.
Do you work at a library, museum, or other type of institution that has a budget for purchasing books? Please consider purchasing this title at our $50 institutional preorder price.
Add a solidarity copy! Purchase your copy for $70 in order to support someone else also receiving an affordable copy. Preorders will ship on December 1, 2024.
Do you work at a bookstore or radical infoshop? We would love your support on this project! Email us at armedbydesignbook@gmail.com if you’re interested in preordering a case of books, or if you’d like to chat about other types of (named) solidarity sponsorship opportunities for this publication.
Author: Interference Archive, Lani Hanna, Jen Hoyer, Josh MacPhee, Vero Ordaz, Sarah Seidman
Publisher: Common Notions
ISBN: 9781945335143
Published: January 2025
Format: Paperback
Size: 7.0 in X 10.0 in
Page count: 304
Subjects: Arts & Politics / Internationalism / Solidarity
About THE AUTHOR
Interference Archive is a community-supported archive of material from social movements around the world, created with a mission to explore the relationship between cultural production and social movements. This work manifests in an open stacks archival collection, publications, a study center, and public programs including exhibitions, workshops, talks, and screenings, all of which encourage critical and creative engagement with the rich history of social movements.
Lani Hanna is a PhD Candidate in Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Cruz. Her research looks at community archives as social movement infrastructure across several rapidly changing cities. She has taken part in organizing several exhibitions at Interference Archive, including Armed by Design. Her article Tricontinental’s International Solidarity: Emotion in OSPAAAL as Tactic to Catalyze Support of Revolution (Radical History Review 2020) was part of a special edition about gender and the Cuban Revolution.
Jen Hoyer is a librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and has volunteered on collections, exhibitions, and education projects at Interference Archive since 2013. Her writing about the intersections of education, archives, and social movement history is available in The Social Movement Archive (Litwin Books, 2021) and What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (Libraries Unlimited, 2022).
Josh MacPhee has been collaboratively making, researching, and collecting political art for over twenty years. In 2011, he cofounded the Interference Archive, a library, exhibition, event, and research space in Brooklyn dedicated to the exploration of social movement culture. He is also a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and the author/editor of multiple books including Celebrate People’s History: The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution (Feminist Press, 2010 and 2020), An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels (Common Notions, 2019), and Graphic Liberation: Perspectives on Image Making and Political Movements (Common Notions, 2023). His solo exhibition, We Want Everything, was hosted by the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2022.
Vero Ordaz is a collaborative focused community member. She weaves her broad life and professional experiences to help bring people together. With a background in American Studies and Labor Studies, she is a higher education administrator and active rank-and-file member of the PSC-CUNY union.
Sarah Seidman is an historian and curator. As the Puffin Foundation Curator of Social Activism at the Museum of the City of New York, she curates the ongoing exhibition Activist New York, which explores two centuries of activist histories in New York City. She has also curated the exhibitions Beyond Suffrage: A Century of New York Women in Politics, and co-curated PRIDE: Photographs of Stonewall and Beyond by Fred W. McDarrah and King in New York, and the exhibition and catalog Armed by Design at Interference Archive. Dr. Seidman holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University. She has received fellowships from the University of Rochester, New York University, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and her writing has appeared in Radical History Review, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, among other places.