I have a new zine out, and this one is a little bit different.
Compost Futures is the second zine I have made in collaboration with the other co-directors of the London Science Fiction Research Community (the first being Gas in the Tank), and it is different to my previous zines for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that this zine has been published academically: it’s in the online supplement of the British Science Fiction Association’s two-part special issue on ‘Zoefuturism’, or ‘a futurism of connectedness, engagement, and relationality’, in their flagship journal Vector.
The second reason this zine is different is that it was written in collaboration with soil. Once we had written and assembled and printed the zine, we buried it for three weeks in the plaggen soil of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The idea for this came, among other things, from Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis’ writing about composting as a citational practice that draws knowledge from ‘arrangement of correspondences’ and ‘quality ingredients’, allowing these ingredients agency in the process of decomposition (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018, 34-35).