In the San Antonio neighborhood of Cali, Colombia, three master printers—Olmedo Franco, Jaime García, and Héctor Otálvaro—still feed lead type into machines built before the 20th century ended. One of those machines, a Marinoni press, arrived from France in 1870. Another, a Reliance, traveled from the USA in 1890. They still work. They still print.
La Linterna is what happens when a craft refuses to disappear. What began as a straightforward newspaper and poster workshop has become something harder to categorize: part working studio, part living archive, part gathering place for people who believe that ink on paper matters.
The workshop's survival is less accident than stubbornness. Over decades, it weathered advertising bans, economic collapse, and the slow certainty that digital design would make letterpress obsolete. Instead, the opposite happened. Young graphic designers, urban artists, and craft enthusiasts started showing up—not to watch history, but to learn from it. Franco, García, and Otálvaro began teaching. The workshop filled with people hungry to understand how a poster could have personality, how imperfection could be the point.
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The posters produced at La Linterna have become something unexpected: artistic objects rather than mere advertisements. The workshop maintains special collections devoted to cinema, rock, and salsa—each poster bearing the weight of hand-set type, the texture of linoleum engravings, colors that don't quite match what you'd see on screen. That inconsistency, that slight wrongness, is exactly what makes each piece singular.
What makes La Linterna matter isn't nostalgia. It's that the people there—the masters and the younger makers who've chosen to learn from them—have created a space where tradition and experimentation genuinely inform each other. The old machines set boundaries. Those boundaries create focus. Within that focus, something contemporary and alive keeps happening.
Visiting means stepping into a working studio, not a museum. You'll see ink. You'll hear the rhythm of the presses. You'll watch people who've spent years learning to coax beauty from metal and paper. In a moment when most design exists as pixels, La Linterna remains a reminder that some things gain meaning precisely because they're made slowly, by hand, with the possibility of failure built in.
The workshop continues to print. More young makers keep arriving.
