At first glance, it’s just a thing. An object composed of words, drawings, paper, ink, and maybe a staple of two (alas, increasingly turned into a commodity, and often a depoliticized one at that).
Yet zines, when done well, are a living, breathing (metaphorically) conduit of our social relations.
This notion builds off my last post on this subject, “Zines as Social Media,” but flips it on its head. Here, zines aren’t the main medium; they are a minor but essential stitch in the fabric of a communal space aimed squarely at mending and/or tending to social relations.
Take, as an example, the bilingual grief space pictured here, set up outside the main entrance to the @montrealanarchist for the whole weekend of May 27-28, 2023. Its focus was on making room, in public, for any form of loss and grief, and allowing anarchists and others to mourn in varied ways—because no grief is the same, and we need/desire different modalities for processing, integrating, remembering, and/or honoring our losses. We need to make mourning a routine part of our circles, binding our joy and sorrows together as we continue to fight for worlds in which life is inherently valued and sacred in order to dismantle the death-machine system. That, in turn, inherently necessities transforming our social relations. Indeed, there’s something intimate and vulnerable and beautiful about how collective grieving opens us uniquely to love, including, expansively, of each other.
One modality in this space—besides everything from tea to tissues, talk to somatics, stillness to music, and so on—was zines: reflective, rebellious, helpful, holy words, set quietly on an altar-like box outside the grief tents for the reading/taking/sharing—just one more grief tool to aid in strengthening our social connections to each other while mourning our dead and thus better fighting for the living.
(photos: free zines, banners, and welcome sign at grief space, May 28, 2023)
