I collaborated on this video with Regine, Leo, and our friends from Justicia 4 Migrant Workers.

Only snippets from this incredible journey are covered in this short video. The events connected the present realities of migrant workers to the history of unfreedom, as seen in the experiences of the anti-slavery underground railway movement and with indigenous peoples’ struggles against colonialism.

A follow-up to last year’s historic Pilgrimage to Freedom, which we also produced a video for.

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Graffiti stencils in London, Ontario via Toban Black

Playlist: Pledge of Allegiance  /  PJ Harvey “The Glorious Land” 

On my first day of school, I remember being introduced to my teacher, Ms. Witch, dressed in all black. When music started playing from the ceiling and everyone froze, I was mystified. What sorcery was this?

Some of my teachers expected us to sing this song, or to faintly mouth the words, but we always had to observe the anthem obediently, if only in silence.

Hearing the music confirmed that you were late, that your body was not where it should be. Watchful figures guarding hallways stopped us in our tracks, holding us with their stares, adding to our delays, to make sure we observed the anthem.

Why was it so important to them? What did it mean?

For one thing, respecting the anthem is part of upholding respect for “the rules” and rulers who govern schools. Otherwise, anarchy would break out.

And then there’s the national part of the anthem. There’s a reason why they make 4-year-olds rise at attention and profess “true patriot love” before we even know what that means.

Playing the national anthem in schools is part of nation-building, or upholding respect for “the rules” and rulers who govern Canada.

***

As activists and designers working with social movements, many of our struggles require us to challenge “the rules” and rulers who govern Canada.

Switching formats from audio to visual, I’d like to look at a different nationalist symbol – the Canadian flag – and the way it gets used in graphic design.

Flags: Rainbow, Marijuana, Black, Tar Sands

When I look at simple graphics that riff on the flag, I notice two kinds of dynamics: seeking inclusion by wrapping yourself or your subject in the flag; and raising critical ideas by showing the flag in a new light.

In the first pair of images (top left + right), the association with the flag is viewed as benign, while with the second pair (bottom left + right) the image of Canada is visibly tarnished.

However, all of these images share a common limitation. Not one grasps things at the root. How can we talk about nation-building without acknowledging the colonial history and present of Canada?

So-called “Native Canadian” flag, unknown origin; 2010 Canadian Olympic hockey jersey logo by Debra Sparrow (Musqueam) with Nike (not a flag, but may as well be one)

Even images that engage with (some might say co-opt) indigenous art and identity can fail to do this. Perhaps intended as an inclusive gesture, or as a powerful corrective, my concern is that this is actually a form of assimilation, of subsuming indigenous nations under Canada in order to extinguish land and treaty rights that are rooted in nation-to-nation relationships.

Ultimately, the Canadian flag is part of an ambitious re-branding exercise. The goal is to consolidate the emotional pull of nationalism to avoid the unsightly reality of Canada’s colonialism.

***

So just because you use the Canadian flag in your design, does that mean you are supporting colonialism?

Aren’t there good reasons to use the Canadian flag? The flag is an instantly recognizable symbol. It provides political and geographic specificity. It helps us name power so people can understand what we’re talking about.

Let’s look at some examples.

By Afuwa Granger as part of NOII-Van’s People’s History of Kanada Poster Project

Occupy Toronto poster; Keep It Public image; Imperialist Canada cover; Shut Down Bill C-10 poster; Canadian Prisons: Apartheid in Action & They Shoot He Scores prints by Jesse Purcell

With the flag graphics, the flag was the statement. Here, the symbol of the flag is just one part of the picture, helping to provide context and convey particular values and ideas.

These communication strategies range from appealing to a sense of nationalism in the Occupy Toronto poster, which uses the maple leaf and red-on-white colour scheme to suggest that the values of Occupy reflect “Canadian values”, to critiquing the nationalist idea that Canada plays a benign (or subservient) role in the world with the cover of Imperialist Canada, which uses the maple leaf to map the oppressive actions of the Canadian state at home and abroad.

 

Illustration from Briarpatch March/April 2011; The Dominion Jan/Feb 2012 issue

While some images use the maple leaf instead of the whole flag, others use a distinctive land mass that clearly signifies Canada. This image may seem less politically charged because it is not an iconic nationalist symbol, but space is contested and geography is political.

We can see different political geographies in the work of indigenous artists like Erin Marie Konsmo and Gord Hill. Konsmo and Hill push back colonial borders by centering a different conceptualization of the land from Turtle Island to Abya Yala.

Instead of proposing a cut-and-dry answer or formula, my suggestion is to think carefully about the choices we make, and the delicate balance between naming oppression and re-enforcing it.

No Borders & Occupy: The Game of Colonialism by Erin Marie Konsmo, Métis/Cree Indigenous feminist and artist

500 Years of Indigenous Resistance, cover and pg. 61, by Gord Hill, member of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation on the Northwest Coast

Illustration by Emily Davidson for The Dominion

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My first zine! Or mini-zine. Inspiration came out of Radical Design School workshops and my Popular Education class with Yogi. I followed this style of template, but I used an actual zine as a guide instead – a cool double-sided one by Kenji Tokawa on silk screening that a friend gave me.

I’m looking forward to getting some feedback so I can find out if it’s useful and/or if people hit snags. It’s super-short, but hopefully once people give it a try, they’ll be interested in learning more. I’d be open to expanding it in the future, or taking on other subjects, or other folks taking on their own subjects with the WTF theme. Requests?

Download (PDF, 1.14MB)

Print Version

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Migrant Justice Political Graphics: No One Is Illegal – Toronto (2003-2009)

I just finished making a batch of these booklets. When I originally designed this back in 2010, I didn’t have the resources to get it printed, so it’s nice to see this through, even though it’s been a while (and I wonder if I would have done this differently now).

I haven’t updated the content, but I did design a new cover and I included the design as a mini-poster centrefold that you can take out (fun!). One thing I learned from this process is that if you’re going to make a booklet, make sure the page count is a multiple of 4! Also, not all staples are created equal, something to keep in mind when you’re stapling through multiple pages.

Fittingly, the multi-lingual cover image was inspired by – or maybe more accurately, lifted from – the banner at the bottom of page 24, so it’s nice to have them together here.

You can download a copy of the booklet here (select the booklet printing option to get it to print correctly). And check out the digital archive on Flickr here.

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I made this poster for May Day here in Toronto. I wanted to try my hand at a 5.5×17 inch format, basically two posters to an 11×17 tabloid page, while thinking about all of those narrow electrical poles we try to put our posters up on.

It uses very minimal text, which has some obvious advantages and limitations – it allows the design to be visually striking and clearer from a distance, but doesn’t tell you a whole lot about what May Day is or why it matters.

And yes, that’s my fist in the image. One of my goals is to use my hand in more of my work, but I thought that meant drawing! And I want to locate myself in my work more, in terms of why I’m doing it. In this case, I’ve been helping to organize May Day marches with No One Is Illegal – Toronto since 2007.

The original idea was not to have a singular image, but a series, so we could scan a bunch of people’s fists, and put those into the posters. I like the variation of a series and the possibility of people putting up posters seeing themselves in the image and feeling a sense of ownership.

This poster below is by M1M, one of the three groups – along with No One Is Illegal – Toronto and (de)Occupy Toronto – trying to help coordinate the planning of the day this year, and it gives you a sense of some of the collective demands.

If you’re interested in seeing more May Day designs, the folks at Occuprint have been sharing new posters almost every day.

See you in the streets!

Update: My friend Hussan made a composite of Toronto May Day Posters!

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I just made this quick graphic in support of Toronto Public Library Workers, who are going on strike today.

The font I used didn’t have an ampersand or plus sign, but fortunately there was an ampersand sitting right there in the image! That’s Lincoln Cushing’s Visons of Peace & Justice (2007), which is about Inkworks Press in Berkeley.

For Print:

Letter Size

Ledger Size

I worked for the public library when I was high school, it was my first job ever. Even though I was part of the library union then, I didn’t actually know what that meant, and it never made itself known to me. Too bad, because I think it could have made a big difference for me and other younger workers.

After working in different union and non-union jobs, my idea of what a union is has definitely evolved over time. When I was working at a library again, this time while at university, my definition of union was what my closest co-workers and I were willing to do to support each other – and I actually felt quite supported.

I’m sure we benefited in many ways from having a legally-binding collective agreement and other formal supports in place, but as “casual” (meaning we were forced to re-apply for our jobs each new term) part-time workers who sometimes had supervisors who were part of the union, we were closer to the bottom wrung of the ladder, and working in such close proximity, we were the union, responsible for negotiating the nature of our working conditions every shift.

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I wanted to share an array of images that I’ve gathered which use the fist & barbed wire as a symbol. For a change, I decided to try making an animated GIF. It was actually pretty easy, so look forward to more animations in the future.

• #1 Julius Fuchik (book author), Notes From the Gallows (1948) via Justseeds
• #2 Unknown Artist, Nikdy! (1961) via 4000 Communist Posters Torrent
• #3 Kearny Street Workshop, Benefit Olga Talamante (~1975) via Kearny Street Workshop Archives
• #4 One Year of Military Dictatorship (1977) by Malaquías Montoya in Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California (2001)
• #5 The Struggle Continues via Howard Besser’s T-Shirt Database
• #6 Unknown Artist (~1943) via 4000 Communist Posters Torrent
• #7 Naji al-Ali’s Handala
• #8 Solidarity Across Borders, Montreal
• #9 No Borders South Wales website banner
• #10 No Borders Camp
• #11 www.noborders.cz sticker, in Prague
• #12  www.nooneisillegal.org sticker, in Toronto
• #13 No One Is Illegal flag at Zapatista encuentro 2007, via No One Is Illegal – Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories
• #14 No One Is Illegal – Toronto banner
• #15 No One Is Illegal – Toronto patch

From Olivier Razac’s Barbed Wire: A Political History (2002)

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I just finished a wonderful course on the ABCs of Letterpress with Akemi at Kozo Studio. I highly recommend it, it’s something I looked forward to every week, and was a great change of pace from all of the digital dependency in my work/life.

My first project (above), was printed with wood type on a Vandercook SP15. The two pieces below were also printed on the SP15, but with LEGO instead of wood or metal type!

I’ll definitely miss it — and will try to come back and rent some time in the future.

Below: Setting wood type by hand (always backwards), putting leading between characters, and furniture to keep the whole composition in place. Photo c/o Kozo Studio

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Israeli Apartheid Week is right around the corner so I decided to post this image of IAW-Toronto posters over the past 8 years. IAW has spread from a single university campus in 2005 to 97 cities in 2011, proving that nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. The nature of this growth is reflected in the posters from 2009 onwards, which offer a general image for collaborating cities to customize based on the timing of their own events and language needs.

IAW was started by students at the University of Toronto. I arrived in time for the second IAW, but I was more or less oblivious. I remember seeing IAW represented in the student press as a snowball fight between Palestine supporters and Zionists. The message was that they were both equally detestable, which was effectively a victory for supporters of the status quo.

But over time the rabid condemnation of IAW has clearly backfired, only bringing greater attention to the BDS campaign, and more scrutiny of those who continue to make uninformed arguments about IAW being a hate-fest.

A lot can change in a year. By 2007 — after taking some time to educate myself and developing personal relationships with people doing this work – I was putting up IAW posters and helping out with events.

In 2009 some friends and I put up the poster on the right as a response to the tearing and defacement of Carlos Latuff’s IAW poster. At Carleton University in Ottawa, the administration saved vigilantes the hassle of doing their own censorship by banning the poster outright, an act that can’t be understood outside of the wider context of malfeasance by partisan administrators.

This year’s wonderful poster was designed by Nidal El Khairy, one of my favourite artists, who also created the images for 2010 and 2011. In my piece on migrant justice political graphics, I mention how his work is a good representation of the connection between Palestine solidarity and immigrant rights organizing:

While in Montreal, illustrator Nidal El Khairy worked with the Coalition Against the Deportation of Palestinian Refugees, one of many groups under the umbrella of Solidarity Across Borders. El Khairy draws Palestinians and his work is often used by the Palestine solidarity movement …

The intersections in El Khairy’s activism between migrant justice and Palestine solidarity is itself an illustration of how these struggles are linked. Palestinian refugees are denied the ability to return to their homeland due to the backing Israel receives from members of the international community such as Canada, while Canada and other states deny Palestinians the ability to move in their pursuit of dignity and respect [by deporting them to refugee camps]. 

No One Is Illegal March on Ottawa, 2005 (illustration by Nidal El Khairy)

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Top: “Free Palestine” (~2001, San Francisco); Left: “Nakba 60″ (2008) by Jesus Barraza; Right: “A Woman’s Place Is In Her Students’ Union” (~2005) by the Canadian Federation of Students

One of my go-to tools for online image research is TinEye Reverse Image Search. When you upload an image or provide a link, TinEye scours the web for every instance of the image in use. To some degree, it is able to detect similar versions of an image that may have been modified. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much help tracking down the original source of the photograph at the top of this post. The image was all over the place but seemingly never referenced.

At this point I turned to Oakland-based artist-activist Jesus Barraza from Dignidad Rebelde for help. Jesus used the image in his poster to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba in 2008. Although he didn’t know the answer, Jesus was also curious and generously offered to post my ask on his Facebook. Amazingly, when DR’s Melanie Cervantes shared the ask on her page, the women in the image were identified by a cousin less than 20 minutes later.

The story of this image, or rather the search for this image, is an interesting illustration of two faces of online culture: one, how ubiquity can deepen anonymity by reproducing an image out of context hundreds if not thousands of times; and two, how the much-hyped connectivity of social networks can help crowdsource research (and put anonymity on an endangered species list). Context is not static, it is actively given and taken away.

An important aspect of Jesus and Melanie’s art is how their work comes full circle by honouring the original context of their sources. In their own words, “we create work that translates people’s stories into art that can be put back into the hands of the communities who inspire it.” The outcome of this process is often quite powerful. As a testimonial to this effect, one commenter on the crowdsourcing note wrote:

I remember telling you & Jesus, how moved I was when I first saw the graphic image of this treasured picture. It means the world. I keep both images in my heart. Thank you.

For me and so many others who encounter their work, this is the type of design that offers a definitive answer to the question “Can design touch someone’s heart?”

The Woman’s Place poster (right image, based on “A Woman’s Place Is In Her Union” with Rosie the Riveter) also has a place in my heart. I think it is one of the first political posters that I was exposed to. I remember it hanging up in the office of the Toronto Youth Cabinet, a group I started organizing with while in high school. But after finding the original image, it’s taken on a new meaning.

Comparing the two images, you can see that all of the visual references to Palestine have been filtered out. Keffiyehs are made into plain (but still “ethnic”) scarves. Gone are the Palestinian flags and even the face-painted Arabic letters that spell out “Palestine”. The image, and by extension the organization producing it, is supposed to be anti-racist because it prominently features women of colour, yet it erases the anti-racist & anti-imperialist issue they were organizing around.

Turning an image with a such a specific context into a sanitized generic representation is a dramatic departure from the spirit of their participation and the feminist anti-racist message the poster intends to convey.

But I also want to locate myself in this critique. I remember a time when I was designing a migrant justice demo poster and used a photo of some people I knew marching in a contingent. I was looking at photos from the previous year’s demo and picked this particular image because I liked it the best. I’d like to say that I didn’t alter their messaging, but I did crop the image, and make it black-and-white to fit within the scheme of the poster (which was certainly more about the general messaging of the demo rather than their specific contingent’s messaging within it).

Knowing the people in the image, I should have asked for their permission. It’s one thing to participate in a public demonstration and another thing to have your faces featured on thousands of copies of a poster across the city. And politically, it’s one thing to organize a contingent where you put forward and control your own chants and messaging and another thing to have someone else re-interpret your participation – your essence – for a new purpose, even if closely related.

Getting consent is obviously difficult if you don’t take a photo yourself or know the people within it. And I’m an advocate for remixing culture, for creatively re-using and re-interpreting the material from our visual environment, but that doesn’t mean that ethical considerations are thrown out the window. Remixing an image is a political act, not necessarily a progressive one. If anything, this post is a helpful reminder for me about the need to be more attentive to these issues.

In & Out: “Students Against Racism”, Canadian Federation of Students; “QuAIA Deputation” (2011), Queers Against Israeli Apartheid

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