Fanmail4Fanzines! - Queer archive activation & community zine-making

Fanmail4Fanzine is the result of a zine workshop hosted on the 6th of June, 2025 by Aimé Dabbadie at Das Feministische Archive FFBIZ in Berlin and commissioned by Trans*missions, an artistic research project that dives into queer archives to unearth the stories of our trans*cestors.

For the workshop, Aimé pre-selected zines from the FFBIZ collection and mixed them up with some from their own collection. About 40 zines were available. The FFBIZ Archive also provided pictures from their collection. The goal of the workshop was to familiarize participants with general zine history, hands-on collective zine making & zines in relation to the archive spaces, as well as activating the zines that sit in the archives by communicating with them in the form of fanmail and transform that content into a zine.

The zine provides the workshop instructions as well as links to publicly accessible online queer archives to invite both participants and readers to hold workshops themselves, share the practice and keep interacting with queer archives.

The participants were given the following directions:

  1. Get to know the collection, browse through the zines and pick one zine!

  2. Really read the zine you chose & select two favorite pages (45 min.)

  3. Scan and print your two favorite pages (15 min.)

  4. On a blank A4 page, write a fanmail letter to the zine you chose, its author or contributors, explain why you relate to it, why you picked it and what you think is cool about it (45 min.)

  5. Collage onto one or two A4 pages with your writing and cutouts from the two scanned pages to be featured in the final collaborative zine (45 min.)

  6. Show & tell of everbody’s pages and sharing circle about the day (45 min.)

    Note: you will be able to leave the workshop with your original pages but if you’d like them to be featured intro a trans*missions zine edited by Aimé, please leave a scan of your pages with them at the end of the workshop <3

The participants chose to work with the following zines:

  • Nina: Just Say No Thank You, a zine about being asexual and vegan by Star (2007)

  • Ruebi: Fat is Beautiful, a zine by Crystal Hartman (2006) & images from Nancy. A queer zine issue #1 by Alex Creep (2011)

  • Cosmo & Siasta Topi / Rowan Pinetree: Ezku, a german trans gazette (1981)

  • Esti: Why is the zine so important within the feminist punk subculture by Harriet Alana (2012)

  • Lotti: Violet by Thomas Rieske (2005)

  • Monti: Lesbian Hanky Panky, Melbourne’s Lesbian History explored via the hanky code

  • Aimé: Autofeminista, a zine about a german association promoting knowledge & skills sharing among women using the example of cars (198X)

  • Liz: Auf-Stellungs-kata-log von Nutten u. Nüttchen e.V, a german sex worker-led zine by Carin (1987)

  • Loeve: Prayer, Lord I am on full dose testosterone and my libido is just by Mata (2022)

  • Jude: Die Krone & ich, a german drag King zine (2004)

We hope that reading this zine encourages you to visit your local queer archives more often and to co-create zines with friends and comrades!

Thanks to all the participants for their amazing submissions & thanks to FFBIZ for welcoming us so well <3

You can book Aimé for a workshop via email: aime.dabbadie@gmail.com

This program was in partnership with Spinnboden Archiv, Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft, Das Feministische Archive FFBIZ, Refuge Worldwide, 90mil Radio, JugendKulturZentrum Pumpe, and Hopscotch Reading Room.

Queer Zines Not Dead is another zine resulting from a queer archive activation & community zine-making workshop led by Aimé in July 2025: