It seems that however state institutions enact power, a bureaucratic arsenal of documents is deployed—a kind of performance in which a cast of Latin typefaces naturally and dutifully inscribe the state’s claims to a standard of incontestable legibility. This sense of legibility (of bodies, natural resources, land) is broader than the clarity of letterforms on a page, but the need for typographic legibility pervades attempts to establish any novel unit of legibility.

In June 2014, the clock atop Bolivia’s Congress building in La Paz was reconfigured to run anti-clockwise. The change was described as a symbol of decolonisation for Indigenous Aymara and Quechua peoples, and a logical expression of southernness. Whereas the conventional clock hails from the northern hemisphere’s sun dial, a counter clock reclaims a connection to the sun dial south of the equator.

It’s 2020. I’m sitting at my dining table in London crying, and Lyson is holding me. I’m trying to find the energy to continue drawing ABC ROM. I’ve spent over a year drawing the italics, and I can’t work for any longer than two hours a day before getting frustrated. A friend later asks if there is some form of automation that could assist with this process.

Localised versions of Cooper Black that include Vietnamese characters have been created and widely distributed for free. For example, VNI-Cooper is a version developed by VNI Software Company, a California-based company founded by Hồ Thành Việt in 1987 that focuses on developing encodings and popular input methods. This is why Cooper Black is ubiquitous in Vietnam, appearing on everything from street signage to food packaging in supermarkets and even in pagodas.

We have a fairly mature grasp of the structure of our first language or languages by the time we start learning to read and write, which has to be done through explicit instruction. Language exists independently of writing; writing is simply a technology and a practice that some societies use and others do not. It is a technology that is relatively new to this continent, where, at the time of colonisation, hundreds of incredibly diverse languages were spoken but not written (although there were and still are other types of complex visual semiotic systems).

A revival (in film and in type) might well both flatten and doggedly carry the latency of its past. In regards to the context of Empire in the time of Ibarra Real’s creation, we are now engaged in a Decolonial discourse, where notions of good/bad, right/wrong, benevolence/profit are being questioned to reveal conditions of sustained—systemic—exploitation. In turn our actions tend to reproduce the past (what we already know), making it hard to give other systems a chance to prove themselves.