Stitched Together: Zine Binding with Wasifa Noshin

Join us for a fresh spin on our zine-making workshops - zine stitch binding - hosted by zine artist Wasifa Noshin!

Zine-making is rooted in self-publishing as a survival, storytelling, and organization tool for LGBTQ2S+ communities - especially outside of mainstream, censored, or hostile media spaces. They document protests, boycotts, solidarities, and link queer struggles with other social movements such as anti-racism, prison abolition, and anti-capitalism.

Because they bypass traditional publishing gatekeepers, queer zines foreground voices often marginalized even within LGBTQ2S+ spaces: trans and non-binary people, working-class communities, and queer people of colour. These zines function as a queer counter-archive: informal, embodied, and collective forms of knowledge-making which resists the limits of formal documentation.

Our Queerborough zine workshops intends to build on that tradition by approaching zine-making as a queer archival and pedagogical practice rooted in PLACE. Centering SCARBOROUGH, we explore how queerness is lived and remembered outside of downtown cores and institutional archives. Rather than asking participants to produce polished narratives, this workshop embraces fragmentation and mess not as failures of documentation, but as central to queer world and knowledge-making. Participants are invited to think with questions such as: "How does Scarborough see you?" "How has your sexuality/gender changed throughout the archive of your life?" "How has Scarborough shaped your identity?" and "What does the past, present and future of Queer Scarborough look like to you?"

This will be a more formal and advanced workshop than our previous zine workshops, as we will be learning saddle and back-stitch binding from Wasifa Noshin.

Although not required, we encourage everyone to come in with gathered scrap-booking materials (perhaps, a donation box of old books and magazines) and ready to get their hands dirty!