book talk “Armed by Design”

Armed by Design reflects on the intersection of graphic design and political solidarity work in revolutionary Cuba through the lens of the production of OSPAAAL, the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Over several decades OSPAAAL developed a keen visual representation of international solidarities across decolonial and anti-imperialist movements and through an immense effort of publishing, and translation distributed Tricontinental Magazine globally. Tricontinental informed much of the revolutionary world about the details, gains, and losses of each other’s struggles as well as sharing theoretical dispatches from and across the Third World. In Armed by Design each author looks at the output of OSPAAAL and its influence on contemporary political artists and publishers. In developing the book editors considered questions of translation, solidarity, and collaboration to ask: what can international solidarity through publishing look like today?

In a book talk with activist, grassroots archivist, and Armed by Design co-editor Lani Hanna, Hoetger discussed the forthcoming expanded second edition of the book, which was first initiated as an exhibition in 2015 from the collection of Interference Archive⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠, New York. Their conversation traversed the fraught political topographies of distribution, design, and the editorial process, focusing in particular on shifts in the visual language of militancy and its effects on international solidarity movements since the rise of human rights discourse in the 1990s.