The Radical Media Archive is a new project by Ramdane Touhami in collaboration with Émile Shahidi to celebrate and preserve the alternative press through a dedicated foundation, exhibitions, reissues and more.
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, when creatives wanted to express themselves graphically, they didn’t launch brands, or fashion magazines, they started political magazines. There was a raw, vibrant porosity between artists and activists and it gave rise to the golden age of radical visual culture. From Re Nudo to The Black Panther, from underground weed zines to feminist, queer, ecological, or anti-war publications, everyone had something to say, and they said it with urgency, with style, with ink.
That pre-internet world of print, protest, and typography-as-revolt has fascinated Ramdane Touhami since the 1990s. Today, this fascination gives birth to a foundation: The Radical Media Archive.
A project dedicated to preserving and sharing alternative press, graphic publications, revolutionary art, and utopian design. For this initiative, Ramdane partnered with Émile Shahidi, a kindred spirit obsessed with visual culture and movements of collective emancipation. Together, they have spent years tracking down rare and often one-of-a-kind printed matter: militant posters, underground zines, and political ephemera artifacts that still burn with belief.
Through this project, they celebrate the work of those who chronicled the good fights, utopias and rebellion, wars and liberation, and the art of those who created the visual language of the revolution through typography, collage, illustration and photography to intrigue, interest and involve others in their causes. They also pay tribute to graphic designers who wanted to draw a more beautiful world, and architects who dared to design a better one. Their blueprints were bold, their visions communal, modular, mobile, ecological. They imagined cities without masters, buildings that breathed, homes for all. These utopian plans, often lost or overlooked, now take their rightful place among the provocative literature and manifestos… proof that revolution isn’t only shouted in the streets, but also sketched in studios.
The Radical Media Archive is not a nostalgia trip. This is visual memory as resistance: magazines, newspapers, records, posters, books. They all shout in collages, bold letters, wild comic strips and smuggled photographs. They ask us to learn from them, and to carry the torch.
On this online store you will find our own books, some selections from our collection, and items drawing inspiration from the rich history of this underground press and paying tribute to its messages and causes.