Star & Shadow Zines (part 1)

For the next 2 months, the old Star & Shadow is on its big fundraising campaign to rebuild in a new premises in Warwick Street. Click here for more. This made me go into my old boxes and dig out the various quick, free, badly photocopied zines I did with people when I was there. Most of these selections are from 2008, 2009, and most of the words are not my own!

Participatorama was an article in a guide to the UK's Autonomous Social Centres, of which we were then one. I felt the words alone gave the sense of what made our place great.

I was always bothering fellow-volunteers to write reviews of the things they saw, and took part in.

Backpage artwork by Martin, Frontpage featuring the real Metal welding once on front of the building by Kev, and lego/robot image by James Johnson Perkins!

I forget if the get-together part of this happened, but the zine box was definitely a regular feature and unknown hands would add their own free zines to it, which I loved.

These little images were of just one of the many bands that played at the Star & Shadow, and the usual image of a local musician hanging outside the front of the building rolling a cig. Regular volunteers will remember the scene.

I love consensus decision making really, but boy does it make your brain grow by how hard it is to take everyone's view on board / second-guessing how the various perspectives might join to go forward, etc etc

Unreliable memory tells me this poem was by Joe?

Excerpt from Kino Bamboozler, a mini zine that was really really hated by some people at the time!

  

This, by contrast, was a surprisingly successful experiment, with new people coming together once-only with Anna Puhakka and myself to sit and wander through the different rooms at different times and do story exercises and create short vignettes, all based on the architecture and ambience of the old building.

Excerpts only of a longer film review, many of which used to be shared on the old wiki / internal volunteers' website.

One of many doodles from the bar, of musicians playing in the main venue.

A cut-up of some old Star & Shadow organisational principles, quite beautiful and quite impossible to read!

Cut-up adverts done for one event, which in turn then produced a 'Manual Zine', ie. one that did not involve a photocopier or computer. Everyone was challenged to produce, by any self-chosen means, 8 identical-ish pages to then share with the other producers. Potato prints, typewriters, darkroom processes and stitching were all involved.