This week, we’re sharing two segments.
First up, you’ll hear comrades from Frequenz-A out of Germany speaking with Eylem Çağdaş, an activist and a trans woman from Istanbul about current protest, queer and feminist perspective, anarchist participation and needs of solidarity. This segment was featured in the April 2025 episode of Bad News: Angry Voices from Around The World, the monthly English-language podcast from the A-Radio Network, which will be available early this week, so keep an eye out in our social media and updated links in our show post. You can find more work by Frequenz-A at frequenza.noblogs.org and more from the A-Radio Network and its contributors at a-radio-network.org. Eylem mentions Bianet and Birgun as good places to get introduced to ongoing news from leftists in Turkey.
Then, a chat with no Bonzo, anarchist historian, printmaker and artist, about how they developed their art, the historical work they do and some upcoming projects. You can find more of their work at https://noBonzo.com and you can find more of no Bonzo from the ACAB 2024 presentation we shared of Art As A Vehicle for Anarchist Ideas, the December 15 2024 TFSR episode.
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Featured track:
- Isyan by Bandista from sokak meydan gece
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Eylem Çağdaş Transcription
FrequenzA: Hi. Today is the 13th of April 2025 and we have the honor to talk with a person, comrade from Turkey, about current protests and the situation there. Thank you for finding time to talk with me. Let’s start with the name you prefer to be called, which pronouns you use and maybe your associations which makes sense for the talk? Who are you and where are you active?
Eylem Çağdaş: Hi. Thank you for your call, for your invitation. My name is Eylem Çağdaş. I am 40 years old. I am from Istanbul. I work as a social worker and translator for publishing houses. I graduated in sociology. I try to be a part of the LGBT movements and in general social struggle. I am a trans woman. That’s all.
FrequenzA: Thank you. Maybe let’s start with the basics for the people who may not be really reading news or may not be up to date. Can you briefly tell when, how and why the protests started, and how do they look?
Eylem Çağdaş: Ok. First, as a summary, I can say, that the use of the judiciary system as an operational tool to intervene in politics has led to this mass reaction. Some describe this as a judicial coup d’etat. As you know, the mayor of Istanbul and the core team around him were arrested in a morning operation, and they tried to convict him with a series of unjust accusations. Right or wrong, in very oppressed societies, like ours, people gather around political leaders. Since all their hopes have been stolen, they see them as a source of hope. Two young leader figures – Selahattin Demirtaş and Ekrem İmamoğlu – the mayor of Istanbul are in prison today. Selahattin Demirtaş is another opposition leader – the Kurdish movement’s young leader – he’s also in jail now. When you take away the last hope of the people, this great indignation, the great mass reaction you see is experienced.
Moreover Trump’s statements praising Tayyip Erdoğan and indicating implicit approval worldwide give the impression that this judicial coup d’etat process was carried out with the permission of global powers. Therefore there is a very generalized feeling in our country – that we are now being abandoned and alonel. We have no other chance than to hold on to each other and struggle together. This feeling is very popular in the state. It can be said that we are fighting with trillion dollars, as a lone and dispensable nation.
FrequenzA: What would you say about the people who are in the protest? Are there any specifics about them?
Eylem Çağdaş: There are people, the republican party people and masses around it, all opposition parties – unfortunately, nationalist and racist ones. Especially young people; young people of all ideologies are engaged in this mass mobilization. It is natural because they are the ones who will be living in this country. Young people breaking down the police barricade in front of Istanbul University created a massive symbolic effect. This caused the people to overcome the wall of fear about resistance. The mobilizations gained mass and momentum because of this. This gave popular character to the mobilizations in general. I can say that all kinds of ideologies and tendencies have a place in this mass mobilization. It is a massive resistance. I repeat, that unfortunately racist and nationalistic parties and tendencies have a place in this mobilization.
FrequenzA: Would you say that people who are in the protest aren’t really fighting for Ekrem İmamoğlu, but rather against Erdoğan? Is it like this?
Eylem Çağdaş: First of all, this is young people’s reaction to the lack of a future. Young people want to be sure of having their future. Young people want to be sure that they will have justice in this country and it can’t be with people who are under arrest and in prison on unjust charges and for unjust accusations. People want these arrested people to be free. They also want the judiciary system to be abandoned as a weapon in the hands of the state. The superficial reason for massive resistance is to defend İmamoğlu and also to be against Erdoğan. But these kinds of demands that I make a summary of are essential in resistance.
FrequenzA: You said that different political directions, parties, or movements are participating. What about anarchists, feminists, and queer people? Are they present? What is their perspective on the protest?
Eylem Çağdaş: The participation of the women’s movement in the resistance was about bringing sexual harassment in custody, in commissariats – to the agenda of the people. In this context, they carried out an action on Galata Bridge (one of the central bridges of Istanbul). Despite great pressure and obstruction, they were able to carry out this action. Apart from that, the LGBT movement has been an organic part of the opposition at the University for a long time. The government’s reactions to LGBT people stem from this to some extent. There is no obvious, more concrete engagement. It’s possible to see rainbow flags in all youth marches as a part of this resistance. Of course, LGBT people didn’t start resisting recently. This is a movement that has been resisting conservative governments and authoritarian regime for decades. Although not officially, the LGBT movement does not refrain from contributing to youth resistance, especially with its experience of resistance in the universities, I can say.
FrequenzA: What about anarchists? What would you say? It’s always a tricky topic when it is about elections, ‘cause Anarchists are usually against them and stuff like this. So are they also present? I don’t know how huge is an anarchist movement in Turkey, and if it’s relevant. Can you maybe say something about that?
Eylem Çağdaş: I didn’t see anarchist identity in resistance places. This protests are not about elections. Is not about the realpolitik dynamics. It’s more than that. It’s about giving an answer to this authoritarian arrogance. Anarchist people, anarchist individuals contribute to the resistance in this frame. But I didn’t see a typical and clear anarchist identity, an anarchist organization in the resistance area.
FrequenzA: The West is silent, as we see here. People who are outside of Turkey probably ask themselves how can they support? What is needed? Which kind of solidarity is needed? There are many people arrested, and protest is ongoing if I understand? What do you think? What do you need from people around the world?
Eylem Çağdaş: First, I can say this. Our friends in Europe are living in a satellite city with high walls. There are such high and thick walls between us that they prevent us from hearing and understanding each other. The Western media also deliberately misrepresent what is happening here. The truth about the Middle East, about a country like us – is lost in the fog of disinformation. We should stop getting to know each other through mass media. I can say, that first, the organic connections should be established with civil society and social movements here. The truth, the real information should be gotten only this way. We should really start listening to each other. Also, the financing of regimes conducting global war in the Middle East and authoritarian regimes should be abandoned. Our friends in Europe should put pressure on their governments in this direction. We must stop financing global war, paramilitary groups in the Middle East, the Third World, and authoritarian regimes worldwide. I think that those points are important.
FrequenzA: If people want to keep themselves updated about the situation, or maybe also to look at the projects or networks which could be supported – is there something you can recommend? It can be in English, maybe that’s easier, but also some things in Turkish. Online tools are helping us to translate. Is there’s something you would say is important to read?
Eylem Çağdaş: The addresses that will give you are my preferences. It is also preferred by the people from NGOs and social movements. The Independent Communication Network’s name is Bianet (bianet.org). It has an english service. It is one of the main information resources for us and the wide world. Also, BirGün (birgun.net) has an english service. BirGün is one of the leftist newspapers. It’s a suitable and information resource you can rely on. These two addresses are updated daily.
FrequenzA: I have no more questions. Is there anything that I didn’t ask about and you think it’s important to say?
Eylem Çağdaş: That was all. That was my summary. I send my solidarity sentiments to our friends in Europe!
FrequenzA: Thank you so much. A lot of strength and solidarity! It’s all looks very pessimistic everywhere in the world, but hopefully there will be some better future if we fight. I hope that the other people will hear about it, and will inform themselves and express solidarity. Thank you so much.
Eylem Çağdaş: Thank you for your invitation.
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no Bonzo Transcription
TFSR: Hello. We are here with the artist, no Bonzo. Please introduce yourself and maybe tell us your pronouns and any affiliations that you would like to share.
Bonzo: Yeah. I use the name Bonzo, and my pronouns are they/them. Currently, I have no formal affiliations, but I am in affinity with several different groups and work on a few ongoing projects with folks. I work as an illustrator, printer, and comic book artist now, and I’m also deeply engrossed in craft making, so woodworking, fabric dyeing, fiber arts, all of that stuff. I’ve been doing this and other stuff for quite some time now.
TFSR: I came to know your work from what was intermittently coming out on PM Press: your coloring book, and all the great stickers. My partner wanted to share that your stickers are her favorite.
Bonzo: Oh, yay!
TFSR: My assumption is that your politics are in the vicinity of the PM Press politics. May I ask, how have your politics or political tendencies changed over the course of your life, and what radicalized you? If that’s applicable.
Bonzo: I was pretty fortunate that I was raised in a fairly left house, and so I had a really solid foundation of already being exposed to liberatory politics from a pretty early age. Those politics were feminism and explicitly a pro-trans and pro-sex work feminism (that is always important to say). I came to anarchism as many people do: through counter-cultural spaces like punk, hip hop, and graffiti. These spaces are often full of anarchist ideas, imagery, writing, and performances, and it’s hard to avoid anarchist ideas in these spaces because there are lots of anarchists in them.
I was influenced by the media produced by these scenes, which I was surrounded by. They were not really the media hung on gallery walls, but the media that was actually there and in my hands, or on punk house or even outdoor walls, these kinds of images and texts and media were also a large part of my introduction to the shared norms and values in our scenes, our collective immediate struggles, and also the international character of our movement. Of course, no media is value-neutral. It all conveys ideas about who we are and what we believe to be desirable. For myself too, as I was in high school during the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and then later Iraq and during the passage of the Patriot Act. Those were pretty formative experiences, and it was a period where there were broad-based mass mobilizations in which anarchists played a huge role, especially against the mass expansion of surveillance and repression. What really radicalized me, though, was just conversations and relationships with other people. For myself, I would say, as a tip of the hat to Malatesta: I see myself as someone who started moving towards anarchism around then and will be in this process of continuing to move towards anarchism forever and always.
TFSR: To maybe put a little bit of a finer point on it, you mentioned the shared values of these spaces you are in. Would that be along the lines of consensus decision-making, stuff like that?
Bonzo: Oh, everything, you know. It’s hard to even say now that I’m asked. [laughs] There are 700 distinct things that I can say. Consensus decision making, horizontal values, values around skill sharing, values against oppression, values against power, and the responsibilities that come along with that too. Even nitty-gritty things like: “Don’t snitch”. We are not snitches in our movement, we have a responsibility to each other and against the state.
TFSR: And just one last thing to tack it on. You have mentioned hip-hop, graffiti, and punk houses. Do you number DIY spaces among that? Maybe that’s implied.
Bonzo: Oh yeah, those are all DIY spaces.
TFSR: OK, cool. Am I correct that you arrived at your art practice by way of graffiti?
Bonzo: Partially. It was a mix of graffiti, street art, and pure vandalism. There were a lot of aerosol and bucket paint, character-based stuff, along with letter-based stuff. Then it was wheat paste that either featured the art you see me making now, or just a standard, agitational political postering. That all looks pretty similar to what I’m doing now, though, of course, I’ve been doing it for about two decades now, so I’ve developed and skilled quite a bit. I still sometimes get very embarrassed when I see older work. This has all really influenced how I think about line, form, and color.
TFSR: What were those first characters or shapes or letter forms that obsessed you? Does that make sense?
Bonzo: Yeah. It was just what people who were in the neighborhood that I was growing up in, were doing, and also what I was seeing when I was driving around in a car or on a school bus or something like that. A lot of that imagery that I was influenced by, was pretty standard things that you see on punk house walls. These are images that a lot of people can pull up if they’re from my generation: things like, “We don’t have to fuck each other to survive”, “follow your leader”, and a lot of CrimethInc posters. All of us have seen the CrimethInc posters, and, those are just some things that produce a lot of desire to go out and make that as well.
TFSR: Yeah. I’ve known a few artists in my time, and the through line is that their hands are never still. They’re always doodling, and if you can catch a glimpse at what they’re doing – a lot of it is repetition, just kind of muscle memory. That’s why I was curious about that.
Bonzo: Particularly when you’re working outside at scale. If you’re doing graffiti or street art or any of these things, you’re working at a huge scale. You have to think about something that, not only you can accomplish, as a small person, who is trying to paint something that’s 12 feet tall. You want that to translate it to somebody who’s 100 feet away from it. You’re often memorizing how to do certain things so you can do them quickly and get out of there. You’re also thinking about how that line and form does translate in that scale. Repetition is something you’ll see a lot of graffiti artists, street artists, and printmakers are using.
TFSR: My next question is why is vandalism such a powerful tool? I think that you would probably have a lot to say to this, but I wonder if you could contextualize it, especially in the context of what we’re seeing with these ugly cyber trucks?
Bonzo: I was so excited thinking about all the little cyber trucks under their fire blankets, and all the beautiful solidarity that we’ve been seeing, even across borders. Pulling back a little bit and thinking about graffiti, street art, and vandalism more generally, I would say that just right out the gate… if we lose our ability to put our work and our thoughts online, and all of our presses get raided, and our cell phones are jammed, there’s always a wall out there. So they can stop you from posting, but they can’t stop you from spray painting or gluing on a wall. They can catch you, but they can’t stop you.
We know, especially through many huge social uprisings, especially in Egypt, where cell phones were jammed and things were shut down. A big way people were communicating with each other was just writing on the wall. I see graffiti, street art, and vandalism within much of that same lineage of our DIY presses and platforms. There is an immediacy to that expression that can be hard to achieve elsewhere, you can make your own zine and pass it out on a blanket. You can wheat paste a poster with just some Elmer’s glue or flour and water, and you can write words on the wall with just a can of spray paint or bucket paint.
I know that the internet has provided us with a pretty fast and high ability to communicate with each other, but that’s still up for censorship, and your identity can be surveilled in a pretty direct way through there, whereas painting, pasting stenciling or even throwing a Molotov cocktail at something can be a really accessible and largely unmediated way to communicate something. I think in this broad sense that we’ve just seen tons of attacks on Tesla dealerships, tons of cyber trucks going up. This is also across borders. There was a huge attack in France that I was stoked to see. I was really appreciative of the comrades out there. They’re definitely doing a pretty good job communicating, and also inspiring other people to action, because all of these are highly reproducible acts.
TFSR: Absolutely. From very distant observation (mostly informed by some of the talks I’ve heard you give and participate in, and by your choices of projects), it seems that the social aspects of art making are important in their content and creation, and in that they exist in a state of conversation. Your work, to me, is dynamic in the sense that I feel that a piece contains facets of things as you’re learning about them. Is that the case? Can you talk a little bit about instruction, as in learning and teaching, and how that might relate to your art practice?
Bonzo: I think this goes back to what we were talking about – those DIY scenes, and goes back to being drawn to anarchist ideas through our counter-cultural spaces, because these were largely horizontal, rooted within skill-sharing and largely producing all of their own texts, art, and music themselves; so this idea that if we want our ideas to be available or for them to proliferate, we are the ones who have to do that.
I learned screen printing (and anything that I do) from others, through skill sharing, through relationships, or maybe even because somebody made a zine and I found it. The art I make is very informed by others as well, by others’ art, song texts, or even their histories. I find it very hard not to see what I do within a gigantic context of what everybody else has done or is doing right now, and skills we all co-developed together. I also see myself as pretty influenced by things anarchists and other radicals have written about art or said about art before.
There’s this prevailing idea of an artist as a specialization that belongs to a few exceptional geniuses. Art has been separated from our daily experience and ushered or closed off into the walls of galleries. What anarchists of the past and now talk about often is that art could be, and has been something different – art, or even beautiful things, could actually be something that anyone can engage in the production or creation of. I agree with people who talk about art or craft, being something that everyone should have the ability to engage in, rather than it being sequestered off into a separate sphere of influence. I largely see what I do – as a broad product of being forever in a process of sharing knowledge and skills with each other, and not trying to limit these things to little fiefdoms. I don’t know if that exactly answered it.
TFSR: It definitely does answer. I wonder if you think that those fiefdoms, that sequestration is a function of academic gate-keeping, a function of capitalist gate-keeping, or what you might have to say about that?
Bonzo: I think it’s everything you just said. I want to be clear – other people have written more eloquently than me about this. I’m kind of just an angry punk when I talk about this. There are these little walls that have been built around people’s ability to engage in art and production with each other. Part of that is academic. You are only able to go and access the equipment that is housed at a university if you are a student there, paying I don’t even know how much money anymore, or if you have a friend who sneaks you in (shout out to those friends 20 years ago who snuck me in places).
In terms of capitalist things, many people have written very eloquently about how the entire art world is essentially just like some big hedge fund scheme for everyone to launder their money in. There is an interest in keeping art and the production of art within the hands of third children of rich CEO families. So everybody can hide their money with each other. With part of that, there’s something that I am increasingly interested in in art, which is the move for artists themselves to become managers. I see a lot of art nowadays that gets produced, like, a huge, constructed thing, and the artist says they designed this, but they paid people to design and construct the whole thing. The artistic value is essentially the cultural or intellectual capital that is applied to that. It’s not about the physical thing itself or even what it’s doing. It’s this person’s name and the fact that they wrote a fancy paragraph about it.
One of the last talks that David Graeber gave was a very lovely talk on how artists are all becoming managers now, and nobody makes anything anymore. If you want, you can go even further back and look at what people like the Arts and Crafts movement were saying. These were a lot of folks around the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s. They were talking about this massive push towards industrialization that was removing people from craft, so the access to both the different tools and the skills that people made it with. They were all just funneling these people into factories. You were working 12-hour days and you didn’t even have the ability to be making a set of plates for you and your family to eat off of it, or something like that. I’m sorry if that wasn’t too eloquent.
TFSR: No, it’s perfect. I wonder if you would make a distinction, though, between the artists as managers and the passing of a lot of information through things such as apprenticeship. What are your thoughts on that?
Bonzo: Apprenticeship is something that I’m mostly familiar with through reading history. Folks are still doing that, and it’s not something I’ve been able to experience or enjoy, but that is a transmission of a collectively shared skill that’s collectively developed. It takes thousands and thousands and thousands of people to get together and think about what is the best way for this wood joint to come together, or what all the different interesting techniques we can make to bind this book, whereas with the artist as manager, all of that actual labor and craft is completely invisiblised. It’s about having a genius idea and about being the special ordained person who came up with the genius idea. And then the design and the labor and craft are all a couple of people who do this labor and craft and they get paid shit. They are not taken care of, they are completely, written out of these art histories. So, here we are going back to almost the cultural or the social capital as art, rather than an actual shared collective process that we can all engage in, share with each other, and become a part of.
TFSR: Yeah, that makes sense. Having worked in a variety of media at this point, can you speak to preferences or differences in your approach across media? That might be too broad of a question. I can hone it in a little bit if you need me to.
Bonzo: This one is actually one that’s really easy for me to answer because this is something I think about a lot. I work in about 100 different media. I just don’t post or share most of it. My preference is always going to be for what is the most accessible and reproducible medium. This is why I’m so drawn to printmaking and illustration as a whole. Whatever you’re usually making – it’s so easy to transmit that to other people and even across distances. The means by which people do these different crafts, like printmaking, a lot of folks can learn to access them. They can access screen-printing or block-printing nowadays, even just by grabbing a library book or watching a YouTube video. You don’t even have to ask a punk anymore. This information is widely available.
For most of the stuff I do, very few things are in these full painterly colors. The first reason for that is because I’m still learning how color works. But, the second is that it’s really hard for somebody to be able to replicate full, extravagant kind of painting. And I love being able to send images to folks across borders, or states, and have other people be able to use them for whatever they want. There’s a lot of work I just do on my own and very rarely share. I make a lot of my work because I’m a nerd and I’m interested. How do you make a pottery? How do you make a bookcase? How do you make a rug? Most of the work I share, it’s shared with the intention that is reproducible for other people.
TFSR: Okay. I think of your work as of synonymous with PM’s branding at this point. Do you have a lot of freedom in what you give them, and do you work from any kind of a creative brief or is it more casual than that?
Bonzo: It’s a lot more casual. My friend just asked me the same question about a week ago, and I’m really happy with that, too. I love this question as it kind of speaks to those punk and relational roots we’ve been discussing and touching upon. So, over the years, I developed relationships and found a lot of deep affinity with the folks over at PM Press. A lot of that happened through working on the Illuminated Mutual Aid because that was a couple-year project, and because of those relationships and affinity, they ended up using a lot of my work. Sometimes this would just happen because I had an idea for a project, and I asked them if they wanted to do it, and they said: “Sure”, or they would see me working on something and would ask if they could support that, and I’d say: “Yes”. It all happened pretty organically and developed throughout the years. I feel really lucky to have a relationship with a press who largely seems to have trust in me and in what I want to do, and also shares a lot of those same interests that I do.
TFSR: To circle back though, can you go into a little more detail on the Illuminated Mutual Aid project?
Bonzo: Oh, yeah. So back in, oh goodness…. Well, maybe I’ll just explain what it is. I don’t even remember what year it was released anymore, it’s embarrassing to admit that. I think it was 2021. Several years before it was released, I decided that I wanted to take a lot of the art and a lot of the history that was influencing me at the time, which was the presses and broadsheets and publications that were produced within the early 1900s anarchist scene, and apply it to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid.
Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid was published, I believe first in 1902 (I could be a little bit wrong). PM actually went in and fixed all the typos that had persisted for 100 years, and I did a treatment where I illustrated the borders of all of the texts, and I also drew several full-page spreads that showed more what a person sitting in 2019-2020 is seeing, how mutual aid evolve throughout the years. So there are full-page spreads in there of needle exchanges and different, more modern examples of that. I worked pretty much within the tradition of the Kelmscott press, which was one of the early Arts and Crafts movement presses. There were a lot of prominent people within that movement, and they would just make the most gorgeous, beautiful books together. I wanted to do that for Mutual Aid because it was a book that I really liked when I was a kid.
TFSR: That’s awesome.
Bonzo: Yeah, it was a really nice project. Now I need to do another one or something, gotta get to work.
TFSR: To touch upon how you value your work being reproducible…that brings me to my next question, and that is that I’ve seen your work presented as stickers, or patches, T-shirts, and coloring books. When you are creating a piece, do you have a particular vision for where or how people will see it, and is there a special appeal in having people choose where and how it is displayed, as in the placement and the coloring, for example?
Bonzo: Sometimes. One of my current pieces exists as a tapestry, a coloring book page, and also as the cover of a comic. It actually got started with me trying to design doors for a bookcase I was making. This is an image called The Beautiful Idea. It has figures with some foxes, baskets, and stuff looking across a valley and a circle-A sun is rising. When I first started making this, it was just to solve the problem of having a lot of old anarchist art books and wanting to make something bug-proof and pretty to put them in. And then it just took off on its own steam, evolved, and then became a thing that was not just for me in my room, keeping my art book safe, but is now another thing of art out there.
What I’m most interested in is how folks who may take one of my images choose themselves to bootleg and change it, because that’s always so personal for them. How they interpret the piece or have a relationship with the piece, or even what their particular kind of passion or desire or craft-making process is. Actually, one of my favorite ways I’ve seen folks incorporate pieces is in quilts. I feel like I want to make a quilt too – that’s just cool and cozy. I love it when folks print their own shirts or put things onto flyers. I just love seeing folks use it. I have this friend in graffiti who would talk about the moment you finished painting a piece and when stepping away from it you are done with your relationship with that piece because it’s probably going to get buffed. Buff is the term for when they paint over graffiti. You know that piece was gonna get buffed anyway, so just walk away. It’s not yours anymore. It just exists out there. I feel that way about a lot of the stuff I make. The moment it’s done, it’s just done, and now it’s out there for folks to do whatever they want to do with it.
TFSR: I would imagine that in the communities in which you participate, you have sort of re-encountered your work organically. Is that an interesting feeling?
Bonzo: Yeah, always. Someone actually painted a piece of mine on a wall out in Portland. I almost fell over when I ran into it. I just couldn’t believe how exciting that was to see. And I have no clue who this is. It wasn’t me, but somebody painted something of mine on a wall. That was one of the coolest feelings. Sometimes, when I see it, it’s awkward. I don’t really share what I look like and I also don’t sign my pieces, so sometimes I run into somebody and I assume that they know what I’m thinking. And it’s almost an awkward moment when I get excited and point at the piece, and they must be thinking: “What is this person?” Yeah, it’s a lovely feeling. I love it.
TFSR: What I came to understand based on my background research is that you’re sort of a historian, in a sense, in that you’re always researching. Can you talk a little bit about the research you’re doing or have done, and maybe how that intermingles with your art practice? One thing that I’m particularly interested in is: if the stuff that you learn about finds its way into your art before it’s (for lack of a better term) fully digested by you.
Bonzo: Yeah, I think so. Okay, so the first question is history research, and then the second is – am I sometimes processing the results of that history research through my art?
TFSR: Yeah, and maybe more broadly even. How do you find your way to this kind of research? Is that a holdover from your youth, or childhood? It sounds like it could very well be.
Bonzo: Yeah, I think what sparked this interest was a project I started doing several years ago, which is, specifically, looking into women’s histories of participation within anarchism. And this was inspired by Clifford Harper’s Anarchy, a graphic guide. This was something that when I was younger, I had as a really shitty photocopy that couldn’t even be stapled because it was so thick. I still have a very dog-eared copy of it that I found to use somewhere. For anyone familiar with this work, it’s really gorgeous. Clifford attempts to give a broad view of the anarchist movement, and he illustrates the whole thing. And Clifford Harper is just a phenomenal artist. If you are in anarchism, you have seen his work, even if you don’t know his name. He’s just absolutely lovely. He is also still with us, and actually coming out with some screen-prints lately, which is cool.
So, I wanted to do this project and do it fully illustrated, to talk about anarchist history through the stories and lives of these women. I think I’d had an idea of anarchist history more broadly, but when I started getting into a lot of the specifics and the nitty-gritty of it, it was really just overwhelming and swept me away. It’s so much larger. If you’re really getting into the study of it and committing yourself to it, it is a gigantic history. It’s a very fascinating, transnational history too. I feel that I pull so many endless fascinating things from it that I am constantly thinking about, that’s constantly influencing me and it does definitely get incorporated into my work. Something a little unexpected for me is that I’m now into the music that a lot of folks were producing back then, so I will hear a very moving song, and I’ll make an art piece based on it, while I’m still getting into who made this song. Why was it made? What is the context in which people were even transmitting this song between each other and across borders?
TFSR: Yeah, that’s exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you very much. You had a piece in the recent edition of World War Three Illustrated. I’m not sure if that was your first piece in there or not.
Bonzo: It was.
TFSR: That’s awesome. Congratulations. Did you grow up reading World War Three Illustrated? Is that part of the stuff that you were taking in?
Bonzo: I grew up reading Seth Tobocman. He was the editor, right?
TFSR: Yeah. Comics are kind of my obsession. Where do comics fit in with your influences and your practice? It seems like you might be moving towards them more so lately. Just more generally, tell me about your relationship with comics.
Bonzo: Funnily enough, comics were some of the first introductions I had to anarchism and one of the main things I’ve consistently had an unbroken interest in since childhood. I just adore comics. I love them. Also animation, cartoons. I love animation and cartoons. Both of these things also really sparked my interest in wanting to draw. Especially, that it’s something that most folks are pretty surrounded by and can access too.
I had a parent who was really into what were, at one point, considered underground comics. Now, a lot of these are pretty famous, like Allison Bechdel’s Dykes to watch out for. She got one of those fancy MacArthur grants, a lot of people know her now, but it’s not in underground lesbian newspapers (anymore). From there, I got into more big box publishing stuff, like the Vertigo imprint from DC. A cousin gave me maybe not all of The Invisibles, but a bunch of them when I was younger. The Invisibles – I’m not saying it holds up, but I love it. It is a product of the 90s.
TFSR: Very big ideas in there.
Bonzo: Yeah, there are a lot of very big ideas. Its author, Grant Morrison, is someone who clearly knows about and has been friends with anarchists, because there are anarchists in there, and there are references to anarchists in there. Then, after that, I got exposed to stuff like the work of Seth Tobocman and Eric Drooker. For folks who are unaware, both of these are hugely prolific comic artists who are part of a longer tradition of radical comic or graphic novelists. Folks may be familiar with Seth Tobocman’s work – War in the Neighborhood – about the New York squat scene defense, or You don’t have to fuck people over to survive – one of the things I used to wheat paste up as a kid.
I’m really happy, that the comic that I ended up making for World War Three was actually made in a comics course that Seth runs. It was just so lovely to see that somebody who had a huge influence on me is now creating this very accessible, familiar and welcoming space to talk about comics, and I’m making a comic, and now it’s in World War Three. It was definitely a peak moment for me.
TFSR: That’s awesome.
Bonzo: Yeah. Comics are always going to be a really compelling way to communicate. Especially the history research that I’m doing – it will inevitably end up within anarchist publications throughout the years. Between anarchist publications, memoirs, and state surveillance, the comics remain one of the best manners in which we can learn about anarchist history. And there are plenty of comics. So a few years ago, just on a whim, I started translating some of these – just because I wanted to know what was in them. Then that turned into trying to republish them for english-speaking audiences. So, right now, I am doing the thing I wanted to do as a kid, just in a slightly different way than I thought would happen.
TFSR: That’s awesome. Is the translation what’s taking up most of your time these days? What issues and actions are getting most of your attention? Having worked across a variety of media, do you try to let the issue or task that you are completing dictate what you bring to it, be it translation, illustration, or what have you?
Bonzo: Yeah. I’m gonna pretend that you asked me this question four months ago, and I’m gonna give you the four months ago answer because that feels safe. Right now, the issues that I spend a lot of time doing, are prisoner support, and historical research. Historical research I see both as memory preservation and transmission. I’m also working on translating some comics right now, that talk about the anarchist resistance to Italian concentration camps, which people may find illuminating.
I’m still distroing, passing things out, doing skill shares on print-making.
It’s hard to say if I ever really have a focus on anything, because I just get gripped by a project, and then I do it. I’m usually doing a lot of different things at one time, so I just have an obsessive amount of ‘to-do lists’ that I keep around to try and keep me focused. I recently (this came out a year ago) translated the work of Roberto Ambrosoli, the Anarchik comic. I think I did that in just three months of straight focus – running for it. That included research and getting connected with folks and tracking things down, blah, blah, blah. Now I have a project, half of which I translated within a week, and it’s been sitting there for four months now. So, you know, I’m doing what I can.
TFSR: I’m imagining that you have done so many skill shares over the years that you have a ready made approach, and you can just drop in the unique aspects to it. Am I correct?
Bonzo: Yeah. You do want to think about your audience. Something I really like doing a lot is working with very young people. It’s definitely always going to be different if you’re working with folks who are like 8 to 14, than if you’re working with your friends, who you already have an incredibly deep rapport with. But also a lot of these skills are really accessible and simple. They do take a little bit of practice, and they take familiarity with…like, you have to build up muscle memory to do them, but they’re very simple.
TFSR: What is it about working with kids that you enjoy?
Bonzo: Kids are rad, and they are super cool artists, and they are trapped within any number of generally, really horrific power relationships. I think that it is good to create spaces with them where they can make huge messes and huge mistakes, and where people are just going to be supportive of them, have fun with them, and not try to replicate those power structures that will exist in a school or a church or something like that. I just naturally like working with kids. I think it’s really fun, especially mural painting. It is chaotic – I want to be clear about that because you’re working with paint and young people. It’s really a delight.
I’m always saddened by how excluded children are, from a lot of our spaces too. Sometimes that’s because it’s necessary. Sometimes we’re doing something really dangerous, and it would be irresponsible to invite a young person. To take them into that space would remove agency from them. Out here, myself and some friends are doing several prisoner solidarity events, and I’m really happy that we make all of them very inclusive and actively inviting for children’s participation.
TFSR: Can I maybe ask what an example of an event like that would look like?
Bonzo: Yeah. This is a little nerdy. Everything we do is nerdy, and that’s great. A little bit back, we did a pie eating contest, and then there was also pin the Molotov on the cop car, apple bobbing, a couple of board games, and also a big food share, so everybody brought savory pot pies to it too. It was just a chill, raucous event. We raised money for prisoners, some letters were written, and we welcomed somebody back from prison. One of our 2020 uprising political prisoners had just been released. It was just a big, joyous, raucous event, and kids got to eat pie and pin Molotovs on cop cars.
TFSR: To kind of button things up. Your art very clearly exists within a tradition. From a visual standpoint, I wonder, what does your art take from the anarchist art that came before it? And what does it add?
Bonzo: Oh, a lot, because I steal a lot. A very small number of my pieces are direct copies within my own style because a lot of times me and these artists would be using different mediums. It’ll just fundamentally look different if I’m drawing it in pen and ink, and they were carving it out of a piece of pine. Usually, I take these images because I adore them, and I want these back in circulation, we don’t have a good copy of the original anymore, so I’m recreating this. But for the most part, almost everything I make is pretty steeped in reference or inspiration. I also really enjoy taking those references from history and just incorporating them into my current work.
For example, something that I really am enjoying drawing nowadays are these circle A suns. A sun is rising in the background, and it has a circle A in it. This was very popular within Catalonia in the 30s. If you’re going through a lot of their publications, you’ll see this motif repeating over and over again, and whereas I’ve never found an explanation from them, about what they thought that meant, what it symbolize to them. I feel that to me it is a symbol of what was in that Malatesta quote that I mentioned earlier today: forever moving towards anarchism, or even a Belgado Pedrini line, ‘anarchy is jubilant dawning’.
I’m really interested in these symbols and signposts that you even see moving through history. An example of this, is in a weird side collection that I have, cause I collect these too. There is an image of a sower, the person who walks with a seed bag and throws seeds onto the ground to propagate. The earliest one I could find was a 1500 wood block, and then I found Camille Pissarro, who was an anarchist artist. I found him making it. Then I found Luis Moreau, who was another anarchist artist making it too. Then I found Clifford Harper in the 60s making it, and then Eric Drooker, probably in 95 or 97 was making it too. Then I’ve also made it, and I put it in the Mutual Aid, and I’ll probably make it again.
So I’m interested in how even just some of these direct images because it’s not just a sower – it’s this very specific posing and light that was used – how that will transmit through hundreds of years of art. I largely see myself as just another participant within our greater common and collective treasury of art and text and song. I’m not sure what I’m particularly adding. Maybe my own particular quirks or ways.
TFSR: Sometimes carrying it on is enough.
Bonzo: Yeah, sometimes carrying it on is enough. And that’s the most important thing with anarchist history – just carrying it on.
TFSR: Well, that sounds like a great place for us to stop. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I’m glad we finally got to do this.
Bonzo: I’m sorry it took so long. I got a job last year.
TFSR: I hate it when that happens.
Bonzo: I hate when you get a job, but it definitely changed my life a lot. I know that you have worked really hard to have this conversation for a whole year, and I just can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.
TFSR: Well, I appreciate your helping to make it happen. I look forward to whatever it is you come out with next.
Bonzo: Thank you. Hopefully it is something soon. Oh, I do have a pitch for a book if you want one.
TFSR: Sounds great.
Bonzo: I just got the notice that these got back from the warehouse today. It’s Shadows in the Struggle of Equality – which is a history of the Anarchist Black Cross, all the way back to its original formation. It was originally written by Boris Yelinsky. Then Matthew Hart, a historian, labor organizer, and participant within the LA ABC has done an incredible job footnoting this whole thing and writing a new introduction to it. I contributed a great number of portraits to it because I study a lot of the ABC secretaries. When this book was initially produced, there were very few copies of it, and it was going to a kind of aging anarchist movement. Now, this book is being put back out there and updated currently, for our current anarchist movement to hold on to the history of the Anarchist Black Cross that has run as almost a continuous black thread throughout the entire history of anarchism. So I’m pitching that book for PM. I’m excited about it. It’s one of my favorite books. So that’s my book pitch.
TFSR: Anything else you want to plug?
Bonzo: No. Thank you for letting me do that last minute. I just really love this project.
TFSR: All right.