Armed by Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL), edited by Interference Archive (Lani Hanna, Jen Hoyer, Josh MacPhee, Vero Ordaz, Sarah Seidman, Common Notions, 2025), is a full-color, multilingual publication on the graphic and intellectual legacy of the OSPAAAL. OSPAAAL emerged out of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana – a meeting of national liberation movements and leftist political parties predominantly from the Global South. Operating out of Havana, OSPAAAL designed hundreds of posters, magazines, and books between the 1960s and 1980s. Until 2019, OSPAAAL remained a political organizing combating US imperialism and supporting liberation movements worldwide through anti-imperialist design practices. 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.

For this book launch, Armed by Design’s co-editor Lani Hanna will engage in conversation with Sanjukta Sunderason (Associate Professor, University of Amsterdam) and Canan Marasligil (translator, artist, writer) on topics such as anticolonial design, translation as political praxis, social movement archiving, and the relationship between the book and the exhibition Past Disquiet currently on view at Framer Framed. The event is moderated by Mikki Stelder.

Registration:  https://framerframed.nl/en/projecten/boekpresentatie-armed-by-design/

Contact info organizers: m.l.stelder@uva.nl.