Edited by Hussein Mitha
Designed by James Brook
With contributions from Lola Olufemi, Mira Mattar, Hannah Proctor, Houria Bouteldja, Farah Saleh, Amirah M Silmi, Maya Uppal, Ghassan Abu-Sittah, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, and Sulaïman Majali
Soft cover | 210 x 148 mm | 64 pages | Printed by Gomer, Wales
This is a publication that I designed for Arika, a political arts organisation that supports connections between artistic production and social change. In Our Lifetime: an anti-imperialist resource was produced for Episode 11: To End the World As We Know It, five days of film, music, discussion and study at Tramway, Glasgow, 13-17 November 2024. The resource includes poetry, essays, questions, prompts, letters and works of anti-colonial imaginary and was edited by the artist and educator Hussein Mitha who I worked very closely with, along with Siobhan Carroll, the producer at Arika.
The design of the book was informed by the immediacy of the powerful content – I used typefaces that were present in the original manuscripts and employed a light touch to preserve the (sometimes idiosyncratic) formatting and layout of the contributors’ Word documents while creating a subtle sense of order and cohesiveness to the layout of the book. The editor had suggested using a design element, motif or imagery to lighten the text but, once the texts were in place, the ‘internal logic’ of the typographic system alongside controlled areas of white space generated a design where such interventions seemed unnecessary (though I did present an option that used a grey version of the angled black rectangle from the cover as a device to mark the opening of each section which wasn’t used).
The angled black rectangle on the cover is the same dimensions as the text block which is rotated by 1 degree to create a feeling of de-stabilisation that seemed fitting to the radical content of the book – the title appears as a block of text at the top of the rectangle suggesting connotations of protest posters or banners. This mood is further emphasised on the back cover which utilises the same black rectangle, aligned to the text block with of the inside pages, with the rallying cry of ‘intifada, revolution!’ layered over it like graffiti on a wall. I initially thought that this slogan would also appear on the front cover but the editor preferred the slogan on the back cover only – on reflection, the starkness of the black rectangle with text at the top only is a far more powerful image: a tombstone for imperialism.
The publication had a very tight production schedule but we were able to turn it around very quickly and even managed to get it to the printers ahead of schedule! The printers of the book, the excellent Gomer in Wales, also pulled out all the stops to ensure that the book arrived in time for the event.