Resistance print cultures, in the form of magazines, posters, pamphlets and other ephemera played a crucial role in coordinating, maintaining, and organizing anticolonial movements and solidarities in the global south. While a shift to the digital might suggest imminent obsolescence to associated socialities, practices and technologies, activists, artists, and historians have demonstrated a renewed investment in the revival of these media formats, aesthetics and imaginaries that developed transnationally across political groups during the decolonisation era.
Dr Viviane Saglier (Department of Film Studies) and Dr Vindhya Buthpitiya (Department of Social Anthropology) engaged with these concerns in the workshop “Visualising Transnational Solidarity” which they held from 5-7 June 2024 at St Andrews with the support of the British Academy Early Career Researcher Network. The workshop brought together 10 ECR researchers from across the UK to explore past and present histories of solidarity print cultures with the aim of building a collaborative space and community to explore anti-colonial visual solidarity work.
The workshop began with a keynote address by Scotland-based Palestinian artist printmaker Leena Nammari titled “Everything is Political, Decolonisation is an Ongoing Process.” The talk called for a deep engagement with decolonial epistemologies to grasp the political urgencies of the present, including the current genocide in Gaza. The following day, participants presented their research in progress, with topics ranging from South Asian cookbooks, memoranda, amateur photography and film posters to anticolonial art and film magazines in Egypt and the British Caribbean diaspora, and from vinyl record covers across the Caribbean and the United States to smuggled letters by Irish and Palestinian prisoners. Presentations were followed by in-depth discussions to locate vocabularies, visuals and points of connection and solidarity with a view of co-producing a collaborative output.
The final day was dedicated to producing a collective output through a practice-based riso printing workshop organised with the support of Dundee-based Yalla Riso. Participants shared their samples and created layered prints that visually articulated the topics and questions developed throughout the conversations of the previous two days. The individual prints will be gathered into a collective zine and distributed digitally.