“Within us are Multitudes.”
A festival growing new zine-making talent across Manchester.
A zine (“zeen”) is a self-published magazine or pamphlet that you make yourself. All you need to make one is a sheet of paper and a pen. An easy way to express yourself and be creative. Print copies to sell, trade, give as presents or leave on the bus. Before TikTok took off they were an important way to share thoughts, feelings, ideas, passions, information that you couldn’t just google. Why zines now? They don’t go viral. Starting out small is less scary. Paper has lasted for millennia. It’s something you can hold, keep, gift. Print will outlive the internet.
We are Multitudes. Heena Patel (community archivist, zine maker, worked on Over Here Zine Fest) Jasmine Gardner (visual artist, Happening in Mcr), Mish Green (writer, zine maker, facilitator, Skear Zines) and much more.
We love that you can put whatever you want into zines. They are stories, rants, comics, portable art. We are frustrated at how many zines reflect a very narrow range of experiences, not really who lives in this city. That zine fairs could do with more regional flavour. Multitudes Zine Fest focuses on black, brown and global majority, neurodivergent, disabled, working class, poor and LGBTQ+ creators. We’ve also made a concerted effort to include people further away from the city centre. People who want to create but are on the outside in multiple overlapping ways.
Multitudes is a Manchester thing. Since October 2023, we’ve held a load of zine-making sessions to develop zine-making talent. People across the city have poured their passion and creativity into their work. We’ve had some heartbreaking, haunting and beautiful work put into print through zine-making. Nature, freedom, illness, survival, migration, loss but also happiness. On 17th August 2024 we’ll have a year’s worth of zines and zine-makers together all in one room at our festival.
We’ve worked in partnership with The Proud Trust, Manchester Poetry LIbrary, OT Creative Space (Trafford), Support for Wigan Arrivals and Sheba Arts (Wigan and Leigh), Commonword (Oldham), Friends of Shahnameh (Stockport) and Cartwheel Arts (Rochdale) to make this happen. These are organisations that are small but really pack a punch with their brilliant work. At the festival we will have a mix of new and established zine-makers. We believe we can all learn something from each other. We want to get together to reduce isolation and bring some much-needed low-budget joy.
