Visiting the Huis van Alijn museum in Ghent

This blog post is a bit late but I still wanted to write a bit and show some photos of my visit to the Huis Van Alijn museum (“House of Alijn”) in Ghent a month ago because I really enjoyed it. Huis Van Alijn is the museum of daily life. It’s a fun museum to explore at any time because the permanent exhibition (which is regularly updated/changed) is well worth a visit and I think it’s a fun activity in these weird times. But I especially wanted to see their current exhibition about protests and parades…

Visiting the Witches exhibition in Brussels

Last week I visited the Witches exhibition in Brussels (Belgium), organised by the ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles). An entire exhibition about witchcraft and witches, I knew in advance that I was gonna enjoy it but it really went beyond my expectations. So I decided to write a little blogpost about my visit and show you some images from the exhibition. The exhibition closes by the end of this week so make sure to visit if you can!

Visiting a witch town

I was in urgent need of a pause from everything, as I’m sure we all are, so I decided to visit (or escape to) a witch town with two friends.

Visiting the Industry Museum in Ghent

Last month I visited the Industry Museum in Ghent (Belgium), formerly known at MIAT. I was especially excited and impressed by their exhibition about the graphic industry and all the machines that were on display: a great variety of printing presses (some of which are still being used by the staff to print museum merch as well as posters for other organisations and projects), typewriters, stencil machines, and the oldest computers.  It was an extra fun and entertaining visit for zinesters because throughout the exhibition you could make your own mini-zine! The exhibition about textiles was intriguing too. I’m a typewriter / printing press geek AND sewing machine geek so it was the best place for me to spend the day. 🙂 (Now someone should only create a guitar pedal exhibition or museum 🙂 ).

Visit the website of the museum for more info.

Take a look at some of the photos I took:

International Zine Month 2021 – zine library day

Today is Zine Library Day, part of International Zine Month! Stolen Sharpie Revolution says:

“Zine Library Day! Search for a zine library in your area and make plans to go someday or contact them about how to include your zine in their collection.”

For this occasion I’d like to talk about the zine library of the Girls Go BOOM Clubhouse in Ghent (Belgium), the only zine library I’ve visited in the past 1,5 year!

20 years of Echo Zines: the first zine I ever made

For the occasion of my zinester anniversary (20 years of making zines! 😮 ), I want to write about my zine journey. This blogpost will tell you all about the first zine I ever made:

List of zine libraries in Belgium

There exist a bunch of zine libraries in Belgium. I define “zine library” here as: “a library or archive that keeps zines in its collection”. Some are historical archives, some are libraries specialised in certain subjects, and others are part of DIY autonomous spaces. Some have mostly artzines and books, some focus on comics, and others collect mainly anarchist pamphlets and political zines. Languages may vary too. Here are the ones I know of:

(logo of the Zine Libraries interest group, not related to the zine libraries mentioned here)

• Acrata (Brussels) – mostly anarchist zines and pamphlets
• Documentation centre of Amazone (Brussels) – some feminist zines
• Amsab (Ghent) – mostly zines and newsletters with a political focus
• Girls Go BOOM Clubhuis library (Ghent) – small feminist library with books and zines at Meubelfabriek
• Infotheek / Anarchist Centre Assez (Ghent) – mostly anarchist pamphlets but also lots of other zines
• Kunstenbibliotheek (Ghent) – mostly artzines / student-focused
• La Petite Fanzinotheque Belge (Brussels) – mostly comiczines
• RoSa (Brussels) – some feminist zines
• Royal Library (Brussels) – some French-speaking fanzines from the 60s
• Shelf Zine Library (Ghent) – mostly artzines
• Vecteur (Charleroi)

(photo taken in Brighton, not at a Belgian zine library but I think photos of typewriters always fit)

Do you know of another zine library in Belgium? Please let me know!

I haven’t actually been to all of these Belgian zine libraries yet so I’d like to do a little “tour” to visit them to find out more about which publications they have and enjoy their zine collections. [Actually I really love the idea of a zine tour too, with zine readings and zine fests, as I wrote in a previous post. But in this case I just would like to visit the libraries one at a time].

Photo report – Zine Happening II

Zine Happening II – April 9-10th:

About a month ago, the second edition of Zine Happening organised by Les VoiZines took place in the Lousbergpark in Ghent. Gudrun, Jo, Mawy, Hannah, the feminist collective FEL and I were tableing together with our zines and mini-zines and Evie also brought her new book Feminisme – een nieuw begin.