What’s On at GZF25
Listening for Change: A Sonic Gathering
ONLINE
How can sound help build solidarity? Explore the role of community radio in climate action in this sonic workshop.
Climate Justice is Disability Justice
ONLINE
Explore anti-ableist design, engage with thought-provoking zines, and gain fresh insight into how care, activism, and creativity can reshape visual culture and drive change.
PALES-ZINE: Palestinian Lands Back in Palestinian Hands
ONLINE
Join us for an interactive 2-hour online workshop where we’ll learn through zine-making, conversation, and creativity. Together, we’ll explore the situation in Palestine, discussing the occupation, climate justice, and the role of art in activism in an open and welcoming space.
Zines for Climate Justice: From Eco-Anxiety to Collective Action
ONLINE / Open to BPOC participants
Led by Solastalgia Zine, this interactive session invites you to explore how zine-making can be a powerful tool for expressing eco-anxiety, processing climate grief, and building collective resistance.
Biome Stories: Close Observation Zines
Drop in, no ticket required!
Use sensory prompts and reflective exercises to explore the garden, deepen your awareness, and magnify your observations. Zine making materials will be available along with equipment and resources to guide you in making a record of your reflections.
Location: The Hidden Gardens Bothy
The Compost Co-Lab
Get your hands dirty, and conduct some simple scientific testing on GALLANT's citizen science compost heap. This workshop will be a great way to explore composting, soil health, sustainability and climate change through the lens of communities, art and science.
Location: The Hidden Gardens Boilerhouse
Field of Zines
Drop in, no ticket required!
Browse climate and activism zines from our extensive Glasgow Zine Library collection. Our archive counts over 4000 zines made across the last 70 years and includes some of the most important expressions of radical self-publishing.
Location: Tramway Foyer
Photocopy Party & Drop-in Zine Making
Drop in, no ticket required!
Glasgow Zine Library will be open all festival weekend for zine making! No experience necessary and all materials provided. The Library’s Palestinian zine collection will also be on display and you can use our photocopier for free to print your own to take away.
Location: Glasgow Zine Library
DIY Tetrapack Printmaking
Drop in, no ticket required!
Learn the art of drypoint etching using old juice cartons and a pasta maker as a printing press. No experience required, just a dose of curiosity and enthusiasm!
Location: The Hidden Gardens Medicinal Courtyard
Making Paints from Earth
Make your own natural paints using earth and rocks from around Scotland. You will transform ground pigments into water-based paints like watercolours to make your own natural art kit.
Location: The Hidden Gardens Boilerhouse
The Year’s Harvest: Sharing New GZL Zines
Drop in, no ticket required!
Each year GZL seeds the development of new zines through commissions, workshops and discussions. Come by and check out the abundance of this year’s programme, meet the makers and pick up copies of their new zines for yourself.
Location: Tramway Cafe Mezzanine
Reparations and Climate Justice
The combined climate and fiscal crises are devastating ecologies and economies globally, especially in the Global South, while protecting the Global North's wealth and its practices of colonial plunder. Join our panellists to look at how climate reparations seeks to chart another path.
Location: Tramway 4
Sounding Out the Environment
Have a go at field recording in this hands on sound workshop.
Location: The Hidden Gardens Boilerhouse
Biome Stories: Close Observation Zines
Drop in, no ticket required!
Use sensory prompts and reflective exercises to explore the garden, deepen your awareness, and magnify your observations. Zine making materials will be available along with equipment and resources to guide you in making a record of your reflections.
Location: The Hidden Gardens Bothy
Nyéléni’s Legacy: A People's Food Policy
Open to BPOC participants
Expect ambient music, good food, ritual, generative somatics and trauma informed check ins in this zine making and protest art workshop for BPOC.
Location: The Hidden Gardens Boilerhouse
Fruiting Bodies
Drop in, no ticket required!
A rolling programme of screenings and audio material, sharing knowledge from academics, activists and artists engaged in climate and social justice, including new work emerging from GZL’s year round programme.
Location: Tramway 4
Field of Zines
Drop in, no ticket required!
Browse climate and activism zines from our extensive Glasgow Zine Library collection. Our archive counts over 4000 zines made across the last 70 years and includes some of the most important expressions of radical self-publishing.
Location: Tramway Foyer
Photocopy Party & Drop-in Zine Making
Drop in, no ticket required!
Glasgow Zine Library will be open all festival weekend for zine making! No experience necessary and all materials provided. The Library’s Palestinian zine collection will also be on display and you can use our photocopier for free to print your own to take away.
Location: Glasgow Zine Library
Exquisite Corpse Flowers
Drop in, no ticket required!
Inspired by the endangered corpse flower and surrealist exquisite corpse game, artist Jacky Cheetham invites you to play with clay as a way to process, absorb and document the themes, questions and conversations you have explored over the festival.
Location: The Hidden Gardens Medicinal Courtyard
Dreaming Utopias: Storytelling for Liberated Futures
In this creative writing workshop, we’ll use storytelling and speculative fiction to imagine liberated, just futures rooted in land, reparations, and collective care.
Location: The Hidden Gardens Boilerhouse
Print a Risograph Call to Action Poster
Create bold, two-colour posters using risograph printing to spark climate action in your community!
Location: Inkling, The Cooperage
Scottish Land Reform and Resistance
With perspectives stretching from Skye to Eigg to Sutherland to Lewis, join our panelists in this discussion considering the lasting impacts of land resistance and what the methods of tomorrow might look like.
Location: Tramway 4
Building Nourishing Economies
Open to BPOC participants
Build an understanding of the tools necessary to build nourishing economies rooted in the Solidarity Economics Framework.
Location: The Hidden Gardens Boilerhouse
Cocoon Radio Glasgow Zine Fest Special
In this special edition of Cocoon Radio, meet the makers behind some of the zines at the festival, and learn about their process. Discover new music too as they take us through a favourite album that lifts them up through hard times.
Words as Sound World
Explore writing processes that go beyond the page in this writing and sound workshop. You will be guided to generate new writing then go on to create soundscapes using simple and readily available methods. No prior experience needed.
Paper, Ink, Press
A special chance to visit a working museum of print that has functioned for 200 years and continues production today. You will learn about letterpress methods, both past and present, as well as having your own chance to set type, ink up and print a poster to take home.
Unlock Your Voice: Art and Activism Zine Workshop
Explore the powerful intersection of art and social change. Zines will become our canvas for activism as we discover the stories, symbols, and messages that matter to you, transforming them into zines that can be your tool for inspiration and change.
Life Hacks for the Chronically Sick
Come for a quiet morning outside in the garden to spend time with other people who experience fatigue, thinking up and sharing our life hacks. We’ll turn our ideas into a collective zine for future reference.
GZL Open House & Photocopy Party
Glasgow Zine Library will be open for dropping in to browse the collection and make a zine or badge. Selected zines from our collection about Palestinian liberation, direct action and activism will be free to photocopy to take home and distribute among your communities and the places you go.
Earth First! A family workshop with Rumpus Room
Children, parents and carers, this one is for you! Gather in the Rumpus Room Yard for a play focused workshop all about the print history of Earth First! (a radical environmentalism journal and movement) and how this relates to us today.
Speculative Sexuality
How might we make love when a body might do anything: change form, shake mountains, be invisible…? In this speculative writing workshop with Leone Ross, you will explore sex and sexuality when nothing is impossible and everything is very fluid indeed.
K Patrick
K Patrick in conversation with Rosie's Disobedient Press, with opening readings from Leo Bussi
Things That Go Well with Rice: A Being Mixed Food Zine Potluck
A potluck and zine-making workshop for people who identify as mixed-race/multi-racial/bi-racial. As we eat, we will explore our different relationships with food and develop those conversations into a zine. Bring a dish to share that ‘goes well with rice’
REEL WEIRD! REEL GOOD!
Drop in to watch the playful and experimental animations our DIY Animation Club have been making this year!
Penned Prophecies
A writing workshop exploring divination, mediumship and channelled writing. You will use tarot to connect with a variety of beings, both alien and terrestrial, and work together to create a new zine of channelled texts.
Reimagining Ways of Seeing
How have Eurocentric ways of seeing dominated our understanding of art and design? How has this shaped narrative and the ways we communicate stories? In this interactive talk, we will consider this, asking how we can expand our notions of what art and design can be.
Drop-In Zine Making
Celebrate self-expression and explore the art of self-publishing in a welcoming and inclusive space. Open to makers of all experience, whether you’re brand new or in the middle of working on a zine already. Just drop in and have a go.
Archival Resistance: Film Screening & Listening Gathering
We will gather to watch/listen to a selection of short films and audio recordings from the Palestinian Sound Archive.
The Sheetzines of Tomorrow
In an age of rampant misinformation and constant attention-grabbing tactics, how can your practice incorporate the tools thoughtful self-publishing provides? This workshop is for people who have a self-publishing project in mind.
Publication Studio Inductions
Publication Studio Glasgow is an open access printing and binding studio based at CCA Glasgow. It periodically publishes books distributed through a global network of 12 studios spanning 4 continents. After this book-binding induction you will be able to use Publication Studio on your own for your own publishing projects.
Ink and Action! A family workshop with Red Sunday School
Families, come along to this creative workshop to discover histories of radical pedagogy and children and young people’s activism! We will delve into archive materials from radical youth movements, including Glasgow’s Socialist Sunday School tradition, and we'll make our own zines to take home.
GZF & Friends Zine Launch + R.AGGS
Join us to launch an array of amazing new zines emerging from the Glasgow Zine Fest community over the past year followed by an intimate gig with R.AGGS. Expect irresistable rhythms with distinctive post punk and high life influences.
Political Vessels
Cj Reay of Black Lodge Press, Anoushka Khandwala and Jess Baines gather to discuss the use of self-publishing to disseminate radical information, facilitate political education, spread stories of resistance, and as a tool for building movements for liberation.
Drop-In Zine Making and Reading Room
Using the library's curated, travelling collection as our backdrop we'll be mucking in and making zines together. We'll have prompts to inspire you on the themes of gentleness, non-violence, activism and advocacy. All ages welcome, all materials provided, no zine making experience necessary!
Magical Overthinking and Me: Conversation and Q&A with Amanda Montell
Author of Wordslut and Cultish, Amanda Montell, joins us to discuss her new book The Age of Magical Overthinking. She will unpack celebrity worship, nostalgia and the phenomena of parasocial relationships, and respond to your questions.
Zines, Scenes, Squats, Anti-racism, Gender Everything and the Kitchen Table with Raju Rage
Time travel to the 2000's to explore radical zine making and Queerhistorical dissidence in London and beyond. We will explore zine making as a tool for personal-political documentation within the ephemerality of social movements. We will go through the importance of iconic zines of the time and create our own mini-zines.