Tandem is regenerating and repurposing our zine project into Liminal, a multi-year collaborative project with the University of Exeter’s Green Futures Network.

Our core partners on this new project, Green Futures Network, feel there is a need for a re-launched publication that focuses on climate adaptation and gives people a platform to voice and process their experiences and ideas around this topic.

GFN are committing in-kind support in the shape of staff time to facilitate and convene connections with climate scientists and practitioners as both contributors and audiences for the project.

RISE zine was originally launched with Oxford University Climate Society in 2018 with the purpose of giving people a creative outlet for their thoughts and emotions around climate change. You can find out more about the zine’s history here.

We envisage building one Liminal zine edition per year. Each edition will involve a new provocation, a build day and a launch event. The zine can be bought and sent internationally, as well as accessed digitally for free.

Liminal - The provocation

Adapting to the impacts of climate change will require the best of us. We have more data about what our future climate could be than ever before, but the way we tell stories about that future is often missing the imagination needed to allow space for new possibilities to emerge.

With this publication, we invite you to explore not what that future might be, but what will happen between now and then?

Where might we find that bridge between the present and the future?
How can the transformation we so urgently need actually come about?

We may have clear ideas of what needs to change - in social, political, technological, and earth systems - but how can we use our agency to cultivate that change?

What can we learn from how we have shifted systems in the past?
What is the impact of division and polarisation on our attempts to adapt?
What different stories can we tell about what adaptation means for different communities in different contexts?

This provocation has two purposes. Firstly, we aim to build momentum for conversations about adaptation, and the paradigmatic shift that it will require in how we work, live, and consider the future. Secondly, in a space where academic and policy-based views are prioritised, it also creates space for more diversity and curiosity in recognising the other forms of knowledge that are just as real, valuable, and effective as those with a greater current reach.

Zine-building

The multi-part process of zine making is key to this project being an effective intervention, helping people voice and process their experiences, and find solidarity. The process involves generating your response to the provocation - this can be in any media and can be fiction or factual. We welcome poems, manifestos, drawings, photographs, scientific papers, comics, music. Using illustration and/or collage, participants then ‘build’ their own or other people’s contributions, either as part of our group build day or at home, into individual zine pages which are scanned and printed using eco-risograph printing. Building is purposefully crafty and accessible, acting as a useful space for people to share thoughts, experiences and ideas.

The zine is then printed and digitised onto the Tandem Collective website. The zine launch event will give contributors the opportunity to read their pieces out and showcase them to a live audience in an informal setting with drinks and food.

Get involved!

The zine project is open to anyone, anywhere in the world - you just need to email in your contribution.

Your contribution can be in any media and can be fiction or factual. We welcome poems, manifestos, drawings, photographs, scientific papers, comics, music.

We tend to be hands-off from an editorial perspective and will only suggest edits if we feel the piece is much too long to allow enough space for others, or has content that we feel isn’t in-line with Tandem’s mission and ethos. For example, climate adaptation and its impacts are topics that can (and arguably sometimes should) bring discomfort, we will not publish anything that causes harm.

We will be hosting an in-person build day in the UK but we can also post ‘build packages’ out to people to create their zine pages at home and then post them back to us. We trialled this at home approach during the pandemic and it worked really well.

We will then be hosting a launch event in the UK where contributors are able to showcase their work to the general public.