iranti press

Founded in 2021 by Maryam Kazeem, iranti press is a publishing experiment based in Lagos, Nigeria. Our work considers publishing as social practice by exploring alternative possibilities for critical and creative publishing acts within and beyond the page.

Since 2021, in collaboration with A Whitespace Creative Agency (AWCA), iranti press’s publishing exercises have taken place in public sites in Lagos such as the Lagoon, The National Public Library, and Eko Atlantic, exploring writing within and around public space, and how to mark, preserve, and engage with a rapidly changing Lagos. Much of the drive for publishing is often focused on the end result, rather than the process itself. By exploring publishing as an act of spatialization, iranti press forges need new models for publishing on the continent—models oriented within African indigenous philosophies and African publics—publics situated within complex geographies, which are radically oriented, shifting, and fluid. Through interventions in publishing and public space, an African public can be made and remade through collective action and performance. Through social process, an African public can eschew exclusionary models of intellectual debate and materialise discursive models which draw a wider public towards radical thinking and social change.

iranti press and AWCA’s inaugural collaborative publishing exercise, FESTAC 2077, is a Lagos based platform for radical art publications leading up to 2077, which draws on the complex legacies of the notable pan-African festival, FESTAC 1977. Since 2021, FESTAC 2077 has materialized through a workshop model which considers publishing as a space for speculation, initiation, and critique, with an initial cohort of ten artists. In 2024, FESTAC 2077 was a recipient of the Goethe Institut Nigeria’s Support and Connect Award and held, “Write, if you please,” a public exhibition, which invited visitors in Lagos to re-enact imagine, and co-create FESTAC 2077 manifestos, extending work created during the workshops. At its core FESTAC 2077 is a community project, which brings people together to perform collective research, and ideate the possibility for change.

iranti press strives to provide African writers and artists with opportunities to create experimental art publications, which can be translated across digital platforms, public space, and experienced (conventionally and unconventionally) as physical book objects.