Launch of The Living Archive | Panel Discussion | Badge Making

Join us for an afternoon marking the public sharing of The Living Archive Toolkit, a socially engaged art project by Ioana Simion (Artizine), commissioned by Culture Within Newham as part of the East London Creative Communities programme, in collaboration with ReInState.

The project explores memory, identity, and storytelling through zine-making, offering a practical toolkit for using zines as alternative approaches to documentation.

Rather than treating archives as official, distant, or fixed, The Living Archive reframes them as intimate and embodied, shaped by lived experience and everyday life.

This final gathering will share the toolkit and selected zines, positioning the Tate Institute as a hub for cultural memory-making.AGENDA:

2:00–2:30pm, Arrival & Open Space

🟡 2:00–3:00pm, Badge-making station (drop-in)Create a wearable badge using prompts connected to the body, lived experience, and the archive. Badges can be taken home. ✂️ 3:00–4:00pm, Mini Zine-Making WorkshopA hands-on session led by Ioana exploring zines as emotional archives. One simple fold, gentle prompts, and time to make. You can keep your zine or contribute a copy to the exhibition (optional).

🎤 4:00–5:00pm, Panel Conversation & Closing, Ioana in conversation with Elena Juzulenaite.A relaxed, forum-style discussion reflecting on:

• How zines can help reimagine archives and expand notions of public art
• Zine-making as a practice of access, care, and collective activation
• Libraries and archives as living, evolving sites of public knowledge
• What it means to steward a toolkit in public, over time

☕ Food & refreshments

Light food will be available, supported through community donations.

More about The Living Archive Toolkit

The Living Archive Toolkit is a free, public creative resource developed through community engagement, zine-making, and shared reflection. It invites people to rethink what an archive can be — shifting it away from institutions and dusty documents, and towards bodies, relationships, emotions, and place.

The toolkit will be:

• freely accessible online via the Culture Within Newham website
• available in person at ReInstate, all libraries across Newham and neighbouring boroughs (list TBC), selected reading rooms and archives.The Living Archive Toolkit is not an academic or traditional archival guide. It is an accessible, art-led resource rooted in emotion, lived experience, and creative practice.

It can be used by anyone interested in using zines to archive their lives, explore personal or collective histories, or experiment with alternative approaches to archiving — whether working alone or with others.

The toolkit is especially relevant for cultural producers, educators, community organisers, and artists who want to engage with these ideas in participatory, inclusive ways.

Ioana Simion is available to activate the pedagogy and methodologies embedded in the toolkit through facilitated workshops and participatory sessions. To enquire, please contact [email protected].

Ioana Simion is an artist, educator, and facilitator working with zines as tools for storytelling and collective expression. Her practice explores zine-making as a form of emotional archiving; a way to document lived experience and inner landscapes through analogue, DIY publishing.

Zine-making sits at the heart of Ioana’s work as an inherently collaborative and social form. Her practice is informed by the history of zines as tools for connection, self-organisation, and shared storytelling. Through her workshops and extended practice, Ioana honours this lineage by creating spaces that prioritise exchange, participation, and the slow building of shared cultures and meaning.

Follow her work on Instagram

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