Journal Safar

In The Lasting Refrain, Nihal El Aasar maps the entanglement of music, politics, and social life in Egypt, showing how sound shapes and mirrors contemporary society. The piece is accompanied by a tracklist, organized into chants.

Read more in Issue 9: Protests

In the wake of May ’68, a new graphic language of political image-making was born in France. One that tore down individual authorship, embraced collective creation, and turned away from the seductive logic of advertising. At the center of this rupture stood Grapus, a graphic design collective founded in 1970 by Pierre Bernard, François Miehe, and Gérard Paris-Clavel, with Alex Jordan and Jean-Paul Bachollet joining in 1975.

What is the purpose of an image? For Gérard Paris-Clavel, it is a commitment to place graphic design in the service of political struggles by amplifying dissent and forming solidarity. In this conversation with , he reflects on his trajectory from Grapus to Ne pas plier, the ethics of unsigned work, and why design must live in the streets and not be fossilized on museum walls.

Photos by
Read more in Issue 9, Protests
(link in bio)

Issue 9 is here: Protests

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To protest is a fundamental human act against injustice. It takes many forms: the defiant act of existing, the organized resistance of multitudes, armed struggles, and the disruption of systems through speech, action, and refusal in person, in prints and slogans online, or on the streets. Some forms of protest require symbols, flags, and specific attire, while others are carried out through non-verbal communication, secret dissemination, and ideological discipline. Yet all of them need cultural carriers–our bodies, our stories, and our marks to hold what can be remembered and learned from. Whether explicit or invisible, in communities or in solitude, this issue explores why we protest, and how, in the hopes of sparking solace, solidarity, and action.

[contd in comments]

In an exploration of typography and word play, Khajag Apelian and zeina fakhry question the implicit and intangible effects that languages have on our cultures, identities and psyches, especially when some languages, like Arabic, are grammatically gendered, while others, like Armenian, are not.

Mind Your Language by zeina fakhry and

Published in our Tongues issue, where we trace language in its many forms. Order Issue 8 at the link in bio.

Restocked! Issue 6: Power is back in stock and available now on our website.

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What can sound do when language becomes dangerous?

Artist and researcher .waheed turns to a language we all inherit: the hum. In Urdu, hum also means we. In 2019, while visiting Lahore during a wave of student protests and parallel uprisings in India, students on both sides of a militarized border were reciting the same revolutionary poems and humming the same banned songs, without ever speaking to each other.

These were the words of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Habib Jalib, and others incarcerated for their voices

Hum and Hum II are multichannel sound installations that engage polyphonic humming as a potent form of collective resistance and remembrance, layering frequencies across time and place to reveal a borderless kinship among liberation movements, led so often by women.

These works carry sound and struggle from Palestine, India, Kurdistan, South Korea, Chile, Iran, and Nunavik. Different languages. Different histories. Bound by the ways women, political prisoners, and marginalized communities have turned humming, lullabies, and folk song into strategies of refusal and care Humming, as she reminds us, lives on.

In Palestine, women developed tarweedeh, a coded form of song sung beneath prison walls to pass secret messages to their loved ones. In South Korea, university students sang a K-pop ballad, “Into the New World,” as riot police closed in, sparking what became the Candlelight Revolution. In Iran, Shervin Hajipour’s “Baraye” became the anthem of a movement led by women and girls, sung in defiance after the killing of Mahsa (Jina) Amini. In Chile, the feminist collective LASTESIS performed “Un violador en tu camino” in the streets, a street action that echoed across the world. In Nunavik, Inuit performers Beatrice Deer and Sylvia Cloutier revived katajjaq, a form of Inuit throat singing passed between women. In South Asia, Dalit mothers sing lullabies that carry the teachings of Ambedkar and imagine a world without caste. And in Turkey, Kurdish singer Nûdem Durak, imprisoned for singing in her native language, continues to hum in solitary confinement.

Published in our Tongues issue, where we trace language in its many forms.