Propaganda Brigades, Mexico 1968

This is an excerpt from Signal:01, in which members of the Mexican based Collective Cordyceps interviewed Felipe Hernandez Moreno, a participant in the propaganda brigades that existed during the uprising in Mexico in 1968. Images above are from that movement. The last two show images related to the crackdown and massacre of protestors that occurred immediately preceding the 1968 Olympics in DF. I’ve included two of the original graphics designed by Lance Wyman for the Olympics to give some context. 

Do you think that graphics played a crucial role in the 68 Movement?

I think that graphics had a very important place because it was what made the movement  educational. When the movement started, there was a lot of abstract talk on the issues and how those problems had developed, and graphics beccame a way to illustrate to people what those issues were.

How did the Propaganda Brigades start? How did you get involved?

When the student movements started, there were 8 demands. We started making our images based on these. We made banners and posters, articulating what we wanted and what we were fighting for. Then we had people from Sociology and other faculties come and ask for graphic support. They would write out flyers and we tried to illustrate the message they sent to us. A poster should be shocking and should use little words, this way people don’t have to stop to read it. The image should tell the message with a single blow, maybe without words at all. 

So we started getting involved making images for ourselves in the art school, but also supporting other departments We used to print on “pegol” paper rolls, which was something similar to the paper used for gummed postage stamps. You would make it moist with a wet rag or saliva, and then bang you could paste it on city buses or cars that were going by. That was our way to contribute as propagandists. I got involved as an infantry brigadier. I would go around with a donation jar in the city buses and give out flyers that were dropped off by different faculties. We had a Strike Committee that was the link between the theoriti

cians, organizers, and us, the ones who created the images. That was how I started.

Was the imagery decided upon collectively?

No, it was individual. Each of us would come up with the ideas, or they ideas came at the moment of cutting  the print would be whatever came out. We generally used relief print making and silk screening. We used linoleum since it was the fastest and most functional, and silk screening we would cut the stencils by hand out of film or paper. Printing needed to be fast for the graphics not to be dated, we had to keep up with all the news and circumstances. All of this was individual. Of course there were also teachers who had images which had already been used, for example Adolfo Mexiac’s image about freedom of expression had been around for a long time. It was one of the most shocking images at that time because of the context. There was another one by Francisco Becerril, another teacher, where the president, Díaz Ordaz, was turning into a gorilla.

It seems like there’s a lot of repetition in the imagery and graphics done by different artists, i.e. gorilla-cops, vampire-politicians, bayonets, etc. Did the artist’s just borrow functional and effective graphic ideas  from one another, or did the Strike Committee ask the brigades for certain representations?

No, the strike committee just asked for support in creating images. And each artist would create their own image, copying it or changing the figure a little bit, but keeping the same idea. We, as artists, called it cultural parallelism.

Do you still think that all of those experiences with the propaganda brigades are still useful tactics today?

Yes, absolutely. The knowledge is still being applied. I feel lucky to be part of the Metropolitan Artists and Culture Workers Convention, and we still fight with social movements that we know, or the ones that come and ask for our support, or we sometimes offer our collaboration with images and posters. We make portfolios, and they are not made just for the hell of it, they have a message, and a message with a context that is relevant to current political issues. We don’t live outside of history just because images don’t have an age. Images will continue to last through time. Those same gorillas and bayonets from 1968 could be updated to today. But we are not focused on history, we are current and we continue to use and invent even our own images.

Johannes Van de Weert and Red Rat

Adventure Playgrounds

Adventure playgrounds were created to bring space and freedom to children in a densely urban environment. These playgrounds vary widely in their approach and organization, but follow the same rough idea: that children use tools to create their own structures and environment. The first adventure playground was organized in Denmark during the German occupation in the Second World War. Originally known as junk playgrounds, they were conceived as spaces where city children could create, build, and destroy a space that reflected their own imaginations using waste material.

Adventure playgrounds came into prominence in the early 1950s in England as a way to reclaim derelict urban spaces, many caused by the devastation of World War II. Children had no qualms about these forbidden zones, often playing happily in rubble heaps, they seemed to prefer the informality of dirt and scraps to formal jungle gyms. Parents, activists, and park designers theorized that these non-traditional environments inspired creative, thoughtful play. They also expressed a growing idea that the environments in which we rear our children helps mold the society in which we live. Traditional playgrounds, with a tightly prescribed range of activities, prepared children to be passive consumers. The adventure playground, on the other hand, allow children to construct the world in their own image and to feel a sense of agency over their own environment. They were conceived as useful pedagogical tools where children learned basic ideas about geometry, construction, and cooperation. And radically they gave children tools which they are generally forbidden: hammers, nails, and saws with which to build (and destroy) their creations.

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

-Paulo Freire

(Top two photos by YNKB, bottom two by Palle Nielsen; from Signal:01)

For more info about current and historical creative playground design and construction check out the always excellent blog, Playscapes.

Rufus Segar

In Signal:01 we were lucky to be able to publish a great interview between a young British designer named Dan Poyner and Rufus Seger, the house designer for Colin Ward’s 1960s Anarchy journal. Here is an excerpt from the interview, and a handful of covers. More can be found in Signal:

I hadn’t realised until just now that you’ve never seen all of the covers brought together like this before.
No, I never saw them en masse. I would just be working—one aheadand one behind. I had a very close focus on the thing. And then, looking at it en masse, you realise how very consistent the ingredients are. You’ve got the one strong image, the title of what it’s about and then the sign off, Anarchy.
But you must remember, it’s an empty room every month, regular four corners, window and a basement. And you would think about it for about a week and you come up with a simple solution.

Do you feel like you had artistic or design contemporaries who were also attempting to articulate politics aesthetically?
I suppose we had friends in the design and illustration world and friends in the London Anarchist Group but there wasn’t any overlap. But for me, the pull between design and politics is strong—they’re indivisible. The reason I stayed with Anarchy for the whole ten years was because I was dedicated to what Colin was doing. I supported him. I was dipped in anarchy before I started designing the covers, then in anarchy that whole decade, and ever since. So the balance between what am I designing and who am I designing for answers itself. So it’s a continuum.

You were working throughout the 1960s and ’70s, but you were out of step with current design trends in many ways. There is little influence of psychedelia or new youth culture trends in the covers. At the time did you feel like you were looking backwards or forwards? Trying to chart new territory?
I don’t think I was trying to chart new territory, or looking backwards or forwards, I was looking at what Colin was doing. I’d get a list of the articles, and I’d have to be completely focused on now! Now was the issue, you didn’t look back to last week or forward to next, just concentrate on what you’re doing and do it as best you can. Get it in, concentrate, boil it up, stick it down and send it to GM Watson on Thursday. You did a half day or a day, really at it, and you put your chin on the line and you did it. No future. No past. It was do the job that minute.

You were blowing up halftones and montaging elements, which predates the xerox style of the 1970s and ’80s, what was your process and your intention?
Well, that’s really about what you do with your visual elements. Blowing up multiple images, particularly typography. Really enjoy your halftones. All that was grist for the mill in the ’60s and ’70s. I pushed that because I could see what graphic design was about. You take the thing and you blow it up until you could see what was going on, then cut a piece out and stick it down. Put it across, something big, something exciting. 

What It Is

Signal is an idea in formation. It is a response to the myopia of contemporary political culture in the United States, our blindness to most things beyond our national boundaries, and our lack of historical memory. There is no question that art, design, graphics, and culture all play an influential role in the maintenance of the way things are. They have also been important tools for every social movement that has attempted to challenge the status quo. The production of art and culture does not happen in a vacuum, it is not a neutral process. We don’t ask the question of whether culture should be instrumentalized towards political goals, theeconomic and social conditions we exist under marshall all material culture towards the maintainance of the way things are. The question we need to ask is whether our cultural production is used to uphold the massive levels of inequality that exist across the globe, or to challenge capitalism, statecraft, patriarchy, and all the systems used to produce and reproduce that disparity.