The revolutionary poster was never meant to be urbane nor gracious. It was conceived as a weapon—cheap, reproducible, portable, and urgent. It belonged to the street, the classroom wall, the factory gate, the safe house. It existed to circulate. The history of political printmaking in the twentieth century is inseparable from this logic of movement: the image as a carrier of agitation. Cuban OSPAAAL posters, printed in Havana and distributed globally through folded magazines of Tricontinental, travelled across continents in envelopes and diplomatic bags. Emory Douglas, as Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, transformed the newspaper into a visual armature of resistance, using graphic illustration to translate theory into a visual language legible to the streets of Oakland. In southern Africa, poster collectives working in exile and underground workshops developed their own forms of visual militancy: the ANC’s Medu Art Ensemble in Botswana, and later poster workshops associated with trade unions and community arts centres, produced graphics that were not conceived as artworks but as instruments of mobilisation. In Mozambique, the newly independent FRELIMO government recognised the potency of the poster as a pedagogical device, commissioning graphics that articulated the visual grammar of the revolution: simplified figures, raised fists, rifles held aloft, slogans declaring the future in bold, uncompromising type.

Manifesto Capitalista enters this lineage with a certain ambivalence. It borrows the language of revolutionary print culture precisely at the moment when that language has been thoroughly absorbed into the machinery of global capitalism. Che Guevara’s face circulates today less as a call to arms than as a logo: printed on T-shirts, mugs, and novelty figurines. The revolutionary image has undergone a curious transformation.

 

Once a tool of agitation, it has become a commodity. If the twentieth century used the poster to mobilise the masses, the twenty-first often uses it to decorate the living room. The central question of Manifesto Capitalista emerges from this contradiction: what becomes of the revolutionary image once it has been neutralised by the market?

 

The project unfolds through a deliberately hybrid format that collapses the distinctions between exhibition, workshop, and performance. Installed at DGI in 27Boxes during the Melville First Thursdays Art Mile, the space was organised less as a conventional exhibition and more as a functioning print studio. Ink rollers, carved linoleum plates, stacks of paper, and a small press formed the operational centre of the room. Visitors encountered the apparatus of printmaking not as demonstration but as process: an unfolding production line in which images were continually printed, dried, and distributed. Over the course of the evening more than one hundred linocut prints were produced and given away to visitors free of charge.

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Yet the generosity of this gesture came with a condition. To receive a print, one had to participate in its making. The plate had to be inked. The press had to be turned. Hands inevitably became stained with black ink. This simple requirement introduced a subtle disruption into the social choreography of the art opening. The etiquette of the gallery—where objects are handled delicately, if at all—suddenly collided with the mechanics of manual labour. Some visitors embraced the process immediately, approaching the press with curiosity and enthusiasm. Others hesitated. Collectors accustomed to encountering artworks as pristine commodities were confronted with an unexpected choice: either participate in the messy mechanics of production or leave empty-handed.

The humour of the situation was difficult to ignore. Within the conventional logic of the art market, value is produced through scarcity. Edition numbers, certificates of authenticity, and controlled distribution are mechanisms designed to stabilise the object’s desirability. In Manifesto Capitalista, this logic is inverted. The prints are neither editioned nor restricted. They are intentionally abundant. Their value lies precisely in their circulation. The collectors who refused to get their hands dirty—those who declined to operate the press—found themselves excluded from the distribution of the image. The revolutionary poster returned, momentarily, to its original condition: a democratic object that belongs to whoever is willing to produce it.

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Central to the installation was an object that initially appeared incongruous within this framework: a modified arcade machine titled Choose Your Freedom Fighter. Borrowing the visual language of 1980s video game cabinets, the machine invited visitors to approach it as though selecting a playable character. Instead of digital avatars, however, the options corresponded to a series of carved linoleum plates representing figures whose images have long circulated within the visual archive of global revolutionary politics: Angela Davis, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Leila Khaled, Eduardo Mondlane, and Samora Machel. The machine translated the structure of the video game into a material process. Selecting a “fighter” did not activate a screen animation but rather determined which image would be printed.

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This playful mechanism reframed the act of historical identification as a form of participatory labour. The visitor’s choice initiated the physical reproduction of the image through ink and pressure. In doing so, the arcade cabinet performed a conceptual pivot. The spectacle of the digital interface—so central to contemporary culture—was redirected toward the analogue mechanics of printmaking. The revolution, so often reduced to an iconographic shorthand, was reinserted into the slow materiality of the press.

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The images themselves draw consciously from the visual vocabulary of twentieth-century propaganda graphics. The portraits echo the stark contrasts and carved textures characteristic of woodcut and linocut traditions associated with political print workshops across Latin America and Africa. Their textual elements reference a fragmented archive of revolutionary slogans drawn from different ideological and geographic contexts. Phrases such as “Meet Communist Party Candidates — Elections ’72,” “La Guerra Olvidada,” and “Povo Africano” operate less as coherent political statements than as historical echoes. Each slogan carries with it the sediment of a particular struggle, yet when assembled together they form a collage of twentieth-century revolutionary rhetoric refracted through the present.

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Placed alongside these prints were small toy figurines representing revolutionary leaders—objects that might easily be encountered in souvenir shops or novelty markets. Their presence was deliberately disquieting. The figurine represents perhaps the most extreme stage in the commodification of the revolutionary image: the transformation of the political subject into collectible merchandise. Where the poster once mobilised collective action, the figurine invites private ownership. In juxtaposing these miniature commodities with the labour-intensive process of carving and printing linocuts, Manifesto Capitalista stages a confrontation between two economies of representation. One belongs to the industrial manufacture of images for consumption; the other to the handmade reproduction of images intended for circulation.

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The title of the project invokes Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (1928), a foundational text of Brazilian modernism that proposed cultural cannibalism as a strategy for resisting colonial domination. Andrade argued that Brazilian culture should devour European influences, digesting and transforming them into something distinctly local. In Manifesto Capitalista, the cannibal metaphor is inverted. Here it is not European culture that is consumed, but rather the revolutionary image itself. The poster—once a tool of resistance—has been swallowed by capitalism and returned to the world as merchandise. The linocut, however, interrupts this digestion. Through the repetitive labour of carving and printing, the image is reintroduced into a cycle of production that resists complete commodification.

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The act of printing thus becomes the central metaphor of the project. Ink pressed into paper leaves a residue that cannot easily be erased. Each impression carries slight variations, traces of pressure and texture that record the physical conditions of its making. Unlike the seamless reproduction of digital imagery, the linocut retains the marks of labour. The image bears the memory of the hand that produced it.

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By the end of the evening the studio had slipped into the kind of loose, convivial disorder that accompanies any good workshop masquerading as an exhibition. Cheap beer and indifferent wine circulated freely; hands were stained black with ink; the press continued to groan under the weight of one more impression. The floor and tables were scattered with freshly printed sheets—some drying, some already tucked under arms, others hastily stacked. As visitors prepared to leave, prints were thrust back toward the artist to be signed quickly, often on still-damp paper. More than one hundred images had entered circulation, each produced through the participation of someone willing to turn the press. The collectors who declined to touch the machinery left without an object. The revolutionary poster—stripped of its aura of rarity—returned, if only briefly, to the condition that originally defined it: an image that belongs not to the collector but to the crowd.