#IIC AHRA Situated Ecologies Conference Zine, 2023 DRAFT

 The zine-making workshop with Ceri Amphlett was very inspiring and I enjoyed seeing examples of her work and learning about the potential of the zine as a very immediate and direct form of communication. I have since led my own zine workshop with MA students who used is it as part of their climate action activism, the success of this has given me the confidence to respond to a call for sessions from the Architectural Humanities Research Association around the theme of 'Situated Ecologies':

Zines have a long history associated with campaigning, sharing information, telling the stories of marginalised groups and activism; they have been designed to circumvent mainstream media and institutions and to democratise political messaging. There is now a renewed interest in the relevance of the zine as a counterpoint to on-line information that is controlled and censored by social media platforms and news conglomerates: contemporary zine makers use the medium for activism - a medium everyone can access, enjoy, feel empowered by and importantly, create themselves.’[1]  

Artists, designers, architects, illustrators and those who wish to contribute are invited to create a mixed-media zine using collage, drawing, printing, typewriting and writing practices. The ‘session’ will be distributed across the conference, an hour of co-creation at the end of each day to reflect upon and capture the themes and actions arising from discussions and debates; the zine-making will offer and opportunity for further dialogue, reflection and documentation through iterative making practices.

As a collaborative action and a form of activism, the ‘session’ will culminate in the creation of a physical, paper zine, a document that will embody the connections made between delegates, and through physical reproduction, connect the makers of the zine with future with readers; the physical zine will also be re-created as an e-zine to be shared digitally with all delegates which will enable them to print and distribute to new readers if they wish:

…the physical act of creating a zine locates zine creators in their bodies, which is a site of care and pleasure, and the act of reading does the same thing for the reader, and thus they are brought into an embodied community.'[2]

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[1] Lu Williams, Estuary Festival, 2021

[2] Piepmeier, A. (2008). Why Zines Matter: Materiality and the Creation of Embodied Community P18. American Periodicals, 18(2), 213–238. 

Interim events

Interim events will continue to include the making of climate action zines with MA-level students and with art-practitioners. There is also the potential to run outreach events with college students and school children in zine-making workshops.

Workshop Collaborators

Belinda Mitchell and Kremena Dimitrova