10 Things from ‘Zines Forever!’

Zines Forever! DIY Publishing and Disability Justice is a display at Wellcome Collection which I co-curated based on my PhD research, open from 14 March – 14 September 2025.

I’ve put off writing anything about Zines Forever! because it feels too big to write about – I worry about missing key things or not doing it justice, or not being able to find a way into it. So I’m using this click-bait-y list format, which also lends itself to my love of lists, which is itself connected to my love of zines, to share just some of it in no particular order. It’s a mix of things I’ve noticed, wanted to talk about or highlight, and just notes of appreciation as well.

Here’s some brief but important context to my writing about the exhibition: in 2020 I applied, successfully, for a PhD studentship at the University of Kent, working with Wellcome Collection’s zine collection. It was a Collaborative Doctoral Award, which meant that it was a joint project between Kent and Wellcome, so I had academic supervisors at Kent, and supervisors at Wellcome. I submitted my PhD in April 2024 and passed my Viva in July 2024. Towards the end of my PhD, Mel Grant and Nicola Cook at Wellcome broached their plans to pitch a display of the zines, based on my research with them, to an internal process looking to develop displays for the Gallery 3 space at Wellcome Collection, which used to house ‘Medicine Man’ and is, for the moment, hosting a series of changing (6 month) displays which take a focused look at objects from the collection. ‘Zines Forever!’ followed ‘‘The Kola Nut Cannot Be Contained’ which was curated by Nathan Bossoh (University of Southampton) and Ruth Horry (Wellcome Collection).

I was brought in on a freelance basis as a guest curator of the display, working alongside Adam Rose, an Assistant Curator at Wellcome. We had our first curatorial workshop in February 2024. I combined a trip for my Viva in July 2024 with our final full day curatorial workshop. The display opened in March 2025. The interim involved a lot of work, most of which was not done by me! 

It’s worth here saying how grateful I am to all the zine makers involved, and everyone I worked with at Wellcome, particularly Adam, Mel and Nic, Emily, and Sol, who I worked with on the Transnational zines event. I’ve tried my best to write about the display in a way which makes clear how much of a collective effort it was.

1. The Zine Spectrum

I’ve written about the zine spectrum in other places, and within my PhD thesis, but it was really fun to turn it into this large wall graphic, and think about how it could be adjusted for an audience that would include people being introduced to zines for the first time. 

Rather than thinking of putting DIY publications on a linear spectrum from Not-A-Zine, to Sort-Of-A-Zine, to A Zine – I borrowed from contemporary visualisations of the autistic spectrum. Instead of seeing the autistic spectrum as a line, from not autistic to a little (high functioning) autistic to very (low functioning) autistic, these visualisations use a colour wheel to convey what it means to be ‘on the spectrum’, with different qualities, characteristics or experiences reflected in the different colours.

Different DIY publications can have different profiles on the zine spectrum. The advantages to the zine spectrum are: 

• it ensures that central to our understanding of zines are the practices and qualities that are consistently emphasised as central to zines by those who make and read them; 

• it prompts a discussion of those qualities, practices or values that are important to zine making, without making an absolute rule that a zine has to be this, or a zine has to be that (from experience, as soon as you try to make an absolute rule defining what zines are, you’re presented with a zine that is an exception to that rule); 

• as an extension of this, other people can adapt the zine spectrum and disagree with me about the qualities, practices or values I’ve prioritised; 

• there isn’t a clear threshold between when something is, or isn’t, a zine – which more accurately reflects my own experience of reading and working with zines and other DIY publications; 

• and finally, it is useful as a tool for the situation it was developed for. I’m not interested in definition for the sake of definition. But in scenarios where what is, or isn’t, a zine is important - for example working with zine collections - this tool helps us think about the DIY publications we are working with.

I worked with exhibition designer Martin McGrath on the wall graphic. I drew the illustrations for each section of the colour wheel, and gave a rough approximation of what I wanted it to look like, and he did the work of designing it on a scale, and making it work on the wall. He held the perfect balance of giving me control on the final design whilst sharing his expertise and filling in the gaps in my skill set (I am used to drawing for an A5 zine, not a several meter high wall graphic). Martin was particularly knowledgeable about access around these sorts of visuals – and this helped inform the design of the illustrations. 

2. The Bed

The inclusion of a bed in the space prompted several considerations: How to ensure appropriate behaviour on the bed? And at the same time, how to avoid it feeling clinical or too ‘wipe clean’? How to make sure that it met Wellcome’s baseline access requirements for seating? How to make best use of existing furniture so as to avoid waste and unnecessary costs? None of these were things I had to solve (again, shout out to Martin McGrath Studio). The end result is pictured below.

 The bed is probably the thing I’ve had the most positive feedback on. Maybe it speaks to the real absence of spaces to rest in museum and gallery settings (something also addressed in the V&A Design and Disability exhibition I  visited this week). Maybe it also speaks to the absence of spaces to lie down in public – when lying down is often what we need as disabled people. Though Zines Forever! was underpinned by the chapter in my thesis on zines as crip doulas (something I’ve also written about in this journal article and in this story on Wellcome’s website), the part of room 2 which includes three zines from bed, and the bed itself, are from a chapter of its own. This chapter looked at zines made from bed, and how zines make the (sick)bed. Though there’s been writing about zines and bedrooms, I hadn’t come across anything that wrote about bed itself. I explore some of these ideas in this polyphony article, and obviously in my thesis. 

3. Working in a different language

The display is spread across two rooms. The first, with light yellow walls, offers an introduction to zines, and zines at Wellcome Collection. The second room invites you to consider in more detail the ways that zines might offer support and resources to others in the experience of becoming (more) disabled. With soft dark green panelled walls – a legacy from the first iteration of this space which showed an Audiovisual installation – the sounds from outside are muted. 

Curating the display was like learning to write about my research in a different language: a syntax of physical space, visitor experience, interpretative text. How to create a space that feels guided, where you can orientate yourself, but that allows for the physical equivalent of skim reading, or for the ways that visitors, for various reasons, might not follow the expected flow of the room.

From a personal perspective, it felt like such a gift to be able to take people around a space that materialised so much of the work I’d been doing in my PhD over the preceding 4 years. This will probably be a ‘well, duh’ point to some of you, but I genuinely hadn’t reckoned with how it would feel to invite people into that space, to have people come in (with or without me), particularly those people in my life who wouldn’t really have ever engaged with it in another form. 

Some of my favourite moments of Zines Forever! have been sitting alone in the space, reading a zine or resting on the bed, and overhearing snippets of conversation as folks engage with the display or discover zines for the first time. This lurking in the space as a curator feels a strange thing to admit to doing (I don’t know if other curators do this but how could you not?)

4. Ring of Fire (continuations)

As well as displaying zines from Wellcome’s collection, and art works connected to these (specifically the fabric original of Chloe Heffernan’s ‘Dependent Alarm’, Rachel Rowan Olive’s original watercolours for ‘Believing’, and the Wellcome Collection item ‘Woman leaning wistfully on a large cushion’ that inspired Clara Searle’s zine), we also were able to commission some works for the display. The two commissions were E. T. Russian’s ‘Ring of Fire: Continuations’ animation and Rae Lanzarotti’s ‘Embodied’ (see 6.)

I have such a soft spot for Ring of Fire – by which I mean, it holds such a special place for me. I bought the anthology because I started my PhD in October 2020, shortly before the second UK lockdown, and it was a long time between starting and actually visiting Wellcome to read zines. I was luckier than many of my cohort that the subject of my research could arrive by post, and that one of the reasons zines are troublesome in archives is that there isn’t really an ‘original’ – just countless reproductions, so getting hold of versions of the zines that I would have been accessing in Wellcome’s archive wasn’t too hard. 

God, you know those zines that just change your life. Ring of Fire was one of those for me. I’d been reading around the social psychology idea of ‘liminal affective technologies’ – basically this idea that to prepare us for all those unexpected moments of big change and transformation and transition we experience in life, we voluntarily engage in versions of these experiences in art, media, theatre – and I flip open Ring of Fire to this page where E. T. is reflecting on their relationship with Frieda Kahlo and it just sings (I write about this page in more detail in this journal article). I’ve written about Ring of Fire plenty but none of those accounts offer just how much this zine means to me. All this translated to being deeply uncool (borderline starstruck) when actually meeting E. T. to discuss the commission and later when they visited London to see the exhibition. 

One of the reasons I wanted to include Ring of Fire in the display was because of the ways it spoke to zines as creating crip genealogies, because of the way that the anthology offered E. T the opportunity to look back and reflect on their zines, and because the majority of Wellcome’s zine collection are contemporary zines (from the last 15 years or so), but zines have a longer history than that. Where I wanted the transnational zines event (see 12.) to situate the display (and so, Wellcome’s Collection) geographically, I wanted Ring of Fire to situate it in time, in a longer history of zines. 

Ring of Fire: Continuations offered E. T. a further opportunity to reflect on Ring of Fire – as the exhibition text explains: 

Commissioned for this display, this animation collages images from the original ‘Ring of Fire’ alongside new drawings. It pays homage to friends, mentors and ancestors from the Disability Justice movement and arts community, many of whom contributed to the Ring of Fire Anthology and who have recently died. They are depicted here in moments of intimacy, care and relation between disabled people, weaving together memory and fantasy.

It speaks, to me, partly to our capacity through zines to come to new understandings or return to old ones, to fold back in time. 

5. Zines Forever!

The title of Zines Forever! (which was not easy to come to – neither myself, nor my co-curator Adam, are particularly fond of finding titles for things) is, in part, joyful proclamation. I pitched Zines 4Eva! - we lost the text-speak in favour of legibility, but the vibe is there – scrawled on the front of notebooks surrounded by stars and hearts. It is also, in part, a reference to the tension of institutional collecting and archiving of zines (see Kirsty Fife on this), preserving zines past their natural lifespan, forever, for posterity, for a hundred years from now (which might as well be forever, given it will be past my lifetime).

It is also, in part, a reference to the ways that zines are so often described as ephemeral but have a lasting or enduring quality that contradicts the description. I think of zines that I have had for years, carried between homes, lent to friends and then demanded the return of, and how permanent they feel in comparison to other things in my life.

5a. Handling the zines

On this (because I don’t know where else to put it, my numbered list structure really falling apart at number 5), I got strangely emotional visiting the exhibition yesterday (two weeks before it closes) when I saw the creased and worn spines of the zines that, at its opening, had been crisp and fresh. It was a sort of non-negotiable from the start that people would be able to pick up and read the zines in the display, and a huge amount of work went on behind the scenes to make this possible (again, work not done by me). 

In my thesis I talk about how Sara Ahmed’s work on use, and its impressions, can inform thinking about zines in an archive. The zines on display in Zines Forever! are not part of Wellcome’s collection – those are still in the closed stores in the archive being preserved. But they are copies of the same zines that are in Wellcome’s collection, which are copies anyway. The zines in Zines Forever! are in Wellcome Collection, being handled by hundreds of unruly hands. One of the logistical things we had to work out was how many copies of each zine we would need to account for any damage or loss over the six month duration of the display. We anticipated needing way more than we actually used (there’s no guide to this, and of the people behind the display, some of us tended towards needing fewer, some of us tended towards needing more), so in the creased spine of these zines I also see care-full hands. Zines are both made and unmade through use. Alison Piepmeier talks about the materiality of zines, how you can feel an embodied connection to their makers. I also think this might be true of the previous readers of a zine, the hands it passed through before reaching yours. But maybe I’m just getting sentimental. 

6. Embodied

Whilst we are on touch, and the impressions of use, the other commission for the display was an edition of Rae Lanzerotti’s zine ‘Embodied’. 

In their concertina comic zine ‘Embodied’, Rae Lanzerotti, a genderqueer artist and zine maker based in San Francisco, explores their experience of sight-loss during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. They have created multiple versions of the zine, each time responding to feedback from the blind and partially sighted community. The first version of the zine was an audio process narration, which incorporates image description into the story narration.

The edition in Zines Forever! includes a tactile concertina zine created from 3d printed plastic, audio narration, and BSL translation. You can run your hand across the zine to read it, and the peaks and troughs of the wooden concertina folds speed or slow – an unintended but interesting consequence of the way the zine is displayed. The production of the zine went through multiple iterations to find the most durable combination of elements, for something visitors were being invited to run their fingers across. It’s held up well, but like the zines with crumpled spines, it too is showing signs of use, and you can feel not just the tactile elements that Lanzarotti intended, but where it has been worn down by other people’s finger tips. 

I love how Rae approaches their work, centering access as an integrated and iterative part of the creative process. I love having a zine in the exhibition which challenges the easy assigning of ‘accessible’ to zine making. Zines are accessible, yes, but to who? Or, zines are accessible and we can continue to re-consider access when we make them. 

7. DIY

It was still there when I wasn’t.

This is a short point but as someone who’s really mostly been involved in DIY organising, it was strange that I didn’t have to take a partial responsibility for everything, in fact it was better if I kept out of some stuff (have I just invented being alienated from your labour?) It was profoundly strange that I did the work, went to the opening, and then came back a month and a bit later for the Zine Takeover event that Wellcome’s Zine Club organised and ran, to find that the display was still there. This point is really an expression of gratitude for the work that went into keeping the display open that I didn’t do. 

Each time I have come back to visit Zines Forever! I have been struck by the zines made by visitors, which slowly came to fill, and then overwhelm, the shelves put up for them. These felt a testament not just to people engaging with the display, or with the power of zines to prompt people to make their own, but to the work that the display took after my job had finished, and the space held and facilitated by the visitor experience team.

8. Interpretative text

Many people make zines to resist the interpretation of others: I made zines because for so long my experiences had been framed by doctors, nurses and other medical professionals. It had been a serious ethical consideration in my PhD: how to write about zines, in an academic research context, without repeating the same patterns of interpretation, without writing over the zines and not letting people speak for themselves. This question extended into the interpretative framework in the display, and from the outset we were talking about and exploring different forms of interpretation. Interpretation, in a museum context, mostly means the text that goes on walls and labels around the display. We approached it from multiple angles. For example, we offered people the opportunity to read and feed into the captions that would accompany their zines. We also identified opportunities for people to write guest labels. As Adam and I drafted interpretative text together, we focused on the zines speaking for themselves – if the zine says it, we didn’t. 

I can’t speak for how this process was experienced by the zine makers themselves, but I was proud of the end result.

The challenges of writing the wall text is one of many tensions that are part of zines being in an institutional context, and which I was not expecting the display to resolve. Other tensions are around the ethics of zines being there at all. And I think, if you’re someone who makes zines it will always feel strange, and sometimes uncomfortable, encountering them in such a different context. There is also a tension about access – about who can access a display in Central London, about who Wellcome Collection is accessible to.

Another aspect of the interpretation was writing the visual guide to the display, which was a plain language version of the interpretative text. We were lucky to work with access consultant Kelsie Acton on forming and refining this. It’s part of the display I’m most proud of.

9. Transnational Zines

Wellcome Collection’s librarians have worked intentionally to collect zines ethically – and part of this has been about building relationships with zine makers, and taking an approach to collecting that tries to avoid the extractive practices that Wellcome Collection is founded on (via Henry Wellcome). One result of this is that the collection is predominately UK zines, with smaller number of zines from the US, Australia, Hong Kong, and other locations. The risk, then, of creating a display of zines from Wellcome’s existing collection, is reifying the narrative that zines are a UK/US or anglophone phenomenon, which doesn’t reflect the global landscape of DIY publishing or contemporary zine cultures. It was important to ground the display in the aims of the Gallery 3 space, to focus on the zines at Wellcome Collection.

I had the opportunity to pitch and produce an event as part of the programme alongside Zines Forever! and I wanted to produce an event that addressed this – locating the display and zooming out from a focus on Wellcome Collection to really put the scale of the display in perspective. I was lucky to work with incredible zine researcher Kika W. L. Van Robays, whose research is on transnational feminist zines, and who artfully chaired the conversation with Riya Behl and Devashree Somani from Zinedabaad Collective, Harits Paramasatya and Karina from Queer Indonesia Archive, and zine maker and poet Gloria Kiconco. The online event ‘Transnational Zines’ was such a good and rich conversation, and was one of my favourite things that I got to support as part of Zines Forever! 

10. The messages

I can’t write about this without getting too soppy or self-indulgent, but I’m grateful for everyone who has reached out after visiting Zines Forever! to share a part that resonated, their favourite zine, their thoughts or reflections, or selfies in front of the entrance. It has felt, sometimes, like living a double life – as I get on with my third-sector job and organising in my Fife town, and slowly wrap up the tendrils of work from my PhD. It’s easy to forget it’s still there, the result of all this work (mine and others) and so it’s nice to be reminded. It is now  ending; it closes in less than two weeks. But you know what they say, some things might end but zines are forever.*

*literally no one has said this ever, I was just trying to find a nice way to wrap up this text which I started with the intention of being a brief and breezy list and is now a 4000 word unruly essay.

Cite this blog: Lea Cooper, 10 Things from ‘Zines Forever!’, 4th September 2025.