Brum Zine Fest 2024

Over the past 5 years, things have gotten increasingly harder for an ever-increasing number of people in ways that are avoidable, from our closest neighbours, to our family and kin of lands facing occupation across the world. Live from our city, the fallout following the bankruptcy of Birmingham City Council brings devasting cuts set to decimiate crucial services, including 25 of the 35 public libraries in the city set to close and 11 community centres sold, with historic cultural spaces such as The Electric Cinema and The Crown on Station Street under threat of the interconnected demolition and development stories already being actively resisted by organisers to spare Smallbrook Queensway, Tower Ballroom and many more buildings facing the same fate. At the time of writing, it is day 155 of heinous genocide against the Palestinian people and their lands, with endless massacres and destruction through an occupation supported by our own government and countless corporations, while others stay silent, despite some of the biggest and most sustained protest marches in Britain’s modern history, and overwhelming public support for a ceasefire.

The realities we bear witness to and continue to resist together feel further than ever from the beautiful, abundant, safe, just, creative, connected, human(e), thriving worlds that many of us seek to embody and create patches of for one another; patches to be yarned together. However, recognising these and many other struggles as all part of one, across local and global solidarities, with interconnections of social and climate justice becoming ever clearer and in plain sight, allows for clearer plural entry points and pathways that lead to the same place: collective liberation.
Violent vehicles of colonialism and imperialism are deeply coded into every system that opposes the living world and our abilities to thrive beyond capitalism, endless economic growth, and extraction and violence against many to sustain it for the few. The pathways out of the inevitable destruction of these drivers will be paved with creativity and education, rage and theory, by doctors, activists, authors, musicians, lawyers, mothers, with a role for everyone. Zines alone can't destroy the roots of imperialist, white supermacist, capitalist patriarchy and their interlocking harms (that range from everyday and direct, to more insidiously systemic), but they can be part of the story and systems of organising shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down. This is sustained, multi-generational, collective work, that many movement ancestors have done long before us with unimaginable strength in order for any of us to be here writing this today.

Lots of things around zine gatherings often aren't named explictly, partly for safety, partly due to working at pace with limited means, partly because it's stating the obvious. Queerness, anti-fascism, (re)distribution of resources and power are so fundamentally written into the DNA of zines that for the most part it doesn't feel necessary to name, just embody. However I think it's an important time to be explicit, that there are no zines without acknowledgement of marginalisation and injustice, and resistance to the forces driving it. Too much of our creativity gets co-opted and commercialised by default; its desirability and communicative power used to facilitate greenwashing, gentrification, and other pursuits of private gain, accelerating new markets, new products, and therefore new forms and scales of social and planetary damage, with the idiosyncratic, eccentric, even oppositional posture of the creative artist now an economic asset.

That doesn't mean that everything in zine culture is serious, or everyone knows everything, or deals only at the abtracted scale of massive knotty problems; far from it. It's as important to directly practice what we would make in a safe and just reality, and insodoing reduce our distance from it, recording and imagining and creating things we love, bringing joy, catalysing nonsense, even in the most brutal realities. The beauty of zine making is you can create whatever you need, and others who need it get to relish in it too, and then make their own thing, and so on, in ways that are open and generative. But we need to practice creative resistance to establish and maintain the freedom for practices of creative flow for everyone, and vice versa. There is no one, without the other.
Independent publishing, DIY organising and creative agency are tools for ideas and narratives to be given form, exchanged, shared, spread and archived. Whatever weird and wonderful things are made, we're all formulating unique volumes that make up a people's library of liberation.

Together we will explore this offering through the lens of ~queering infrastructure~ to look at what spaces and ways of making, organising and sharing together we must invent and create and find in order to speak and to thrive and to live as more pressure is put on us, acknowledging the many intersections of our identities to be held together skilfully and tenderly within the self at odds.
In connection to the social and physical, regenerative and extractive, local and global infrastructure contexts laid out above, and many others you may bring with you:

• How can we make, organise and share in our homes, streets and neighbourhoods?
• How do we defend, reimagine and steward existing infrastructure such as public libraries, cultural sites, and community spaces?
• As makers and organisers, what do we dream of and actually need, and what new forms of infrastructure are required for this?

This comes with deep humility, gratitude and recognition of work of so many peers, including Healing Justice Ldn, MAIA, Rabbits Road Press, The GAP, Afroflux, A is for Activism, Dark Matter Labs, RESOLVE, WeCanMake, Queer-Side, Freedom & Balance, Retrofit Balsall Heath, Ladywood Unite, Edinburgh Zine Library, Barnard Zine Library, Dundee Zine Fest, and so many more who we continue to learn from and alongside together, including through this open invitation.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Hive, 43-47 Vittoria Street, Birmingham, United Kingdom