Folding in: A Conversation with Zinedabaad Collective on Joy, Artistic Expression, and Building Community through Zines

Art is inherently political. As acclaimed playwright, Dario Fo, once said, “Every artistic expression is either influenced by or adds something to politics.” Expressing yourself through art needn’t be complicated. In fact, you can fold a piece of paper, clip a few sheets together, draw, stick, or write something on them, and make a zine.

Short for ‘fanzine’, these self-published booklets have their roots in the Harlem Renaissance and science fiction fandoms in the United States in the 1930s and 40s. And while the word ‘zine’ is a relatively new, western term, self-publishing has a long and diverse history, forming integral parts of anti-establishment movements across the globe.

Zinedabaad Collective, founded by Riya Behl and Devashree Somani, continues this legacy, anchoring their work in the potential of zines to build an open-source, socially engaged, and inclusive future. Written, printed, painted, collaged, poetic, doodled—in the world of zines, it’s only the zine-maker, or zinester, who decides the limits of what they create. Inexpensive and easily reproducible, they are often traded between creators. They can be a powerful act of expression, a space for joy and a way to connect and build community.

For Riya and Devashree, who met in college, and discovered a common passion for social initiatives and volunteering, zines felt like a natural fit. Beginning with what was meant to be just a single workshop in March 2020, Zinedabaad grew quickly. Over the past four years, Zinedabaad has collaborated with 60 individuals and organisations and facilitated over 50 zine-making workshops, talks and gatherings. Over 800 people from across the world have submitted multilingual zines to their platform. Zinedabaad draws inspiration from zinesters that they have seen or learnt from such as the Queer Zine Archive Project and The Alipore Post. Their spaces emphasize that everyone is creative, play and pleasure are crucial, and collaboration rocks.

I had the pleasure of talking to Riya and Devashree about their beginnings in Hyderabad, the spirit of the zine, the osmosis between their other work and Zinedabaad, and much more. Below are excerpts from our conversation.

Riya: I first came across zines at around 16 through a pop-up sale by Bombay Underground, one of the oldest zine collectives in India. I was really excited by the possibilities of the medium. In college at Ashoka University, I began volunteering with them, selling their zines on campus. I have many memories of lugging a suitcase filled with zines from Delhi in the metro and then a shuttle, the whole two-hour journey to Sonipat.

Devashree: I discovered zines through Tumblr, when I was around 14. I was a through and through fan kid. I used Tumblr to be a part of fandoms and to ship ships, but I also had a lot of existential anxieties and I didn’t have the language to even ask the questions I had. What I did know was that I wanted to hear people talk about their stories. And zines were this really powerful medium in which I was seeing that in a very unfiltered and raw way. And there was community built around it; people found each other through zines. It’s not just put out into the world; a lot of the zine’s tone is very collectivising, mobilising.

Riya: Devashree and I became really close friends in 2019-2020 while we were both living in Hyderabad. In March 2020, I had to leave. We were feeling a sense of helplessness with regards to the political situation at the time—it was the peak of the anti-CAA/NRC protests. We wanted to gather, dialogue, dissent, and make something with our hands. I asked Devashree if she would conduct a zine-making workshop with me.

Devashree: Riya said, “I’m leaving the city. Do you want to throw a goodbye party with me for Hyderabad?” It was never designed to be the beginning of a collective or anything like that. We had never even conducted a workshop before.

Riya: I had been to two zine-making workshops, both of which introduced zines as an open, welcoming medium. So, it didn’t feel scary to hold one. We held the event at Lamakaan, a beautiful cultural centre with big trees and this great canteen with cheap, delicious food. We knew very few people in Hyderabad, so no one came. So, as Devashree set up the room, I went from table to table in the canteen area with two zines saying, hey, do you want to come for a workshop? People obviously had a lot of questions. I think I answered them because nearly all of them joined us.

Devashree: We played a banging playlist and dumped a whole lot of newspapers and art supplies across a row of tables. Having access to a non-judgemental space of creation—you could feel palpable joy in the room. Absolute strangers who had no idea what was going on not only joined, but stuck around for two, three hours. In the middle of this workshop, we had to go buy more supplies. It was lightning in a bottle. Something magical happened in that room. Sustaining that feeling really became what pushed us to do more.

Riya: We started our Instagram page because people had made such beautiful things and we wanted to document it somewhere. And we came up with a name because we had to name the page.

Devashree: Mine is actually the zine I made at Lamakaan. I didn’t think of myself as a zine-maker before that workshop. I used my nani’s old sheets of embroidery patterns to make an eight-page mini zine. Really ambitious first zine also—on the poster side, I made a reverse zine as well. The first side featured a lot of despair and anger, and the other side held a lot of optimism and hope.

In that moment, not only was I seeing myself so clearly in this act of articulation, but I was also feeling seen, situated in community. I was not sitting in my room and journaling, trying to come to some poignant understanding of self. I was just taking scraps of paper that other people were tossing around. Everyone was hovering over each other’s zines and talking about what they were making. It was a really beautiful experience for me.

Riya: In March 2020, during the first lockdown, zines became a way to process what was going on. I made a mini zine, really quickly, in like 15-20 minutes. It’s just white paper. I wrote the lyrics of ‘Ajeeb Daastan Hai Yeh’ in pen, cut up the newspaper headlines that we were seeing at the time, and put them next to each other. I thought, okay, well, this is finished. And it was just such a stark contrast to how I otherwise create things, where I nitpick and go over things again and again to make sure that it’s perfect or generally overthink everything. With that zine, I felt okay with making something that may not be perfect and showing it to others.

Riya: Both Devashree and I have been very involved in grassroots social movement spaces in different ways. And so, it was only fitting that the name of the collective is a nod to these spaces that have had a very strong influence in our lives and our politics. We have tried to build ethical foundations for Zinedabaad following what we understand as the spirit of the zine.

The zine is a non-commercial, non-professional, independent medium of uncensored self-expression. So, we look to create spaces that are open access, and foster a sense of social justice. Zines have played such a huge role in championing voices of people who have faced marginalized experiences so, we wanted the name also to reflect this intention.

Devashree: I have been volunteering consistently for a really long time, starting at an animal shelter at 13. At the time that Zinedabaad was born, I was coming to understand people’s movements in India and how vibrant they are. The mirror of my professional life and Zinedabaad’s trajectory is interesting. I think I never would have considered myself a facilitator unless Zinedabaad happened, or gravitated to arts-based practices in participatory work. My professional life also took me into grassroots, rural spaces, working closely with community, with programs that were designed from the ground up. I don’t really know what came first, but there were a lot of alignments, a lot of osmosis.

Riya: In a sense, developing a media practice oriented towards social change has been my trajectory throughout. Zinedabaad was one more way for that to happen. I also met a lot of people through my work at People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) who already knew about independent publishing in Indian languages happening across the country, which has really influenced how we think about Zinedabaad. Professionally, we were working, especially in the pandemic, in very heartbreaking circumstances. So Zinedabaad became a space to express ourselves, create space for joy and pleasure, to feel whatever we were feeling at the time. And it continues to be, given that the world is still falling apart.

Devashree: The language of the zine has primarily existed in the Global North. So, when we were starting, we thought about how, if the word zine doesn’t really exist historically in India, who are we in conversation with? Then we changed our lens from looking for the zine to looking for the spirit of the zine. So, we locate ourselves in a larger history of self-publishing in India, for which we have found extensive roots going back decades pre-independence.

Riya: A lot of mainstream media is commercial and funded by major industrialists. The social media that we use is also controlled by very few people and can be a tricky space to express oneself. A 2014 survey by the Centre for Media Studies in Delhi found that issues from rural India only occupy 0.24% of the front pages of major Hindi and English dailies. This is the context that we are operating in and resisting.

Riya: For instance, at the 2023 Serendipity Arts Festival, we created a library and did a series of workshops through which people who attended the festival could contribute. At the same time, we recognised that in Goa specifically, people parachute in, do things, parachute out. So, we made the choice to do Serendipity only if we were actively able to engage with local communities. We designed community workshops, partnering with three local NGOs, so that the voices of Goan people could be part of the library.

We did one workshop with women who are social entrepreneurs on ideas of nourishment through Goa Livelihoods Forum, one with children at Bookworm Library and a third with elderly citizens at Cooj, a community centre. We also offered our support in case they wanted to take this forward in their own settings. And while we also did parachute in and parachute out, it was an attempt, with the resources we had, to engage with communities beyond Panjim.

Another example is our work with women vendors through SEWA Delhi as part of a collaboration with an organization called City Sabha. City Sabha wanted to research how women vendors access public spaces.

Devashree: The women made zines to explore their own identities, their relationship with public spaces, with labour, rest and leisure, both individually and then together as a group over the course of many months.

Riya: We did this in the middle of a pandemic, so we didn’t directly facilitate these sessions. We designed sessions for someone else to facilitate and took their feedback to design the next, which was twice the amount of work. But we wanted to work with this group of women and the feedback we received was really motivating.

Devashree: We’re always keen to work with anyone who wants to do something with zines in their own specific context and wants our support. We are happy to freely brainstorm, provide backend logistical support, whatever they might need.

Devashree: Nearly all our workshops have either been free or with minimal ticketing. We try to ensure that the person who calls us or collaborates with us bears the cost of our labour rather than the participants. The money that we charge also depends on our collaborator: a grassroots NGO has a different budget than a well-funded corporate entity.

The money that we do take also enables us to commission other artists, work with other creatives, and generously bring supplies and travel to places to conduct workshops where we are not paid.

Riya: This is something we’re still figuring out. It’s helped to reach out to folks who have been in the art space, like Manojna Yeluri from Artistik Licence. We continue to talk to each other about what it means to get funded and by whom.

Devashree: There is such a lack of transparency especially in this independent art world, especially in spaces that value social justice, about financial matters. So we’re striving to create spaces in which we can all learn from each other and create more transparency amongst peers. At the same time, we always recognize that value is not defined by the money that you get paid.

Riya: A lot of the things we do, and what other people have done for us, have been voluntary and it’s really important for us to value that labour. Value can come from the heart, brain and/or wallet.

Devashree: We don’t design anything in isolation. When we work in community spaces, we work closely with either members of the community themselves or people that have been working with members of the community. We rely on the expert, so to speak, of the space, to tell us about what is contextually relevant, where natural interests might lie, what might be too foreign, too challenging, things like that.

Riya: Sometimes this has also meant that we don’t do projects because coming together in a space and making art may not be the thing that is really needed in that moment.

Devashree: There is no one way to make a zine, from the kinds of folds to what gets put on that piece of paper—writing, collaging, drawing, doodling, anything else, all of the above. It is a non-professional form, and doesn’t require technical expertise. Anyone can do absolutely anything without judgment, because all of it is welcome in the world of zines. That’s historically and culturally true to the movement.

Riya: We hope to grow intentionally, keeping room for what’s happening now in the world and how we can address that as artists, as people who are founders of this collective. I am going to the UK later this year to do my MA in Power, Participation and Social Change at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. We’re looking at my time in the UK as another opportunity to engage with zine makers and libraries on that side of the world.

Devashree: Our anchor is the spirit of the zine. We have some archival interests which we want to explore more in the future—delve deeper into the histories of self-publishing and archive some of the various hyper-local, regional, non-English, non-Hindi iterations of it. Our interest in community building is something we want to delve further into, expand, strengthen. With Zinedabaad, it has been exciting to break the mould of what spaces zines can exist in and what zines can do, to do a little bit of that genre bending with the zine. Any future for Zinedabaad will always be exploring what else can we do with the zine and what spaces can we take this medium to.