Zines as Method: Participation, Community, and Emotional Archives

This workshop is for anyone interested in embedding zine-making within their work. Led by artist-educator Ioana Simion, it introduces zines as a participatory, art-led method for meaningful engagement and alternative approaches to archiving.

The workshop forms part 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.

During the session, Ioana will share excerpts from the toolkit and introduce the key concepts and methodologies behind the project, inviting participants to reflect on how these ideas might be embedded within their own practices.

The Living Archive Toolkit is not an academic or traditional archival guide. It is an accessible, art-led public and free resource rooted in emotion, lived experience, and creative practice.

Rather than offering rigid instructions, the toolkit introduces a set of ideas and methods that can be adapted, played with, and embedded across different contexts.

At the heart of the toolkit is the idea of emotional archiving: a way of recording life that values feeling, imperfect memory, and lived experience alongside facts and dates.

By historicising the self, emotional archiving creates space for personal stories to enter public discourse, especially those that are often invisible, overlooked, or undocumented.

Zines are central to this project because they are democratic, DIY, permission-free, and anti-hierarchical, as well as accessible, personal, and playful.

A zine can be made by anyone, at any time, about anything. It is self-defined, self-validated, and self-published.

By bypassing cultural, institutional, and economic gatekeeping, zines expand our radical imagination. They are not made for profit or approval, but for expression, connection, and shared meaning.

Working with paper, hands, and simple materials slows the process down and creates space for reflection. Analogue making encourages attention, care, and presence, allowing ideas to emerge through doing, rather than needing to be fully formed in advance.

In this way, zines become love letters to memory, place, and personal truth, preserving stories directly from the source, without needing to be polished or proven.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: 

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  

• This session is open to cultural producers, educators, archivists, artists, and anyone curious about embedding zine-making within their work. No prior experience with zines or archiving is required.
• Please arrive as promptly as possible so we can begin together, though the session will remain relaxed and welcoming throughout.
• All materials will be provided.
• Light refreshments will be available.
• If you have any access requirements or questions ahead of the session, please get in touch in advance via [email protected] we’ll do our best to make the space comfortable and accessible.

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