Cork Zine Fest (CZF) was initiated in 2018 by artist and event producer Oriane Duboz and is now organised and overseen by artists and zine makers Annie Mar Forrester, Cassiel DuCharme, Elize de Beer and Justine Lepage. Since the first CZF hosted in St Peter’s Cork in partnership with The Friary, CZF has been focused on bringing together and promoting the Zine community in Cork and across Ireland, facilitating a platform for zine makers to not only share and sell their publications, but to foster a supportive community, have valuable discussions about the role of zine making and their power to create wide reaching dialogues of people’s lived experiences.

Early editions of CZF hosted talks with Bloomers Magazine, Cork Community Art Link, Cork Zine Archive, Sukie Zines and artist Kate O’Shea as well as a live comics reading from Stephen Morton. Since 2022, CZF has run two successful weekend festivals with its current core team and hosted various events in collaboration with The Living Commons, Good Day Cork, Dose Social, Creativity & Change, and MTU Crawford College of Art & Design. Each festival includes a weekend market with a series of engagement events including workshops, zine readings and panel discussions. CZF also runs a series of open zine workshops as part of Zine Club, creating an important space for people to learn from each other and grow the zine community within Cork. CZF is a zine-maker focused market and festival that runs an annual market and event programme, alongside a Zine Club that offers open zine-making sessions to the general public.

CZF will present an ambitious residency period to further develop CZF within the larger arts community in Cork City. Over the three-week residency period the CZF team will facilitate and oversee a programme that is focused around zine making and use it as a tool for community building and a platform to support and promote fellow zine makers. The programme will be called Zine Makers Month and will include partnered Cork City organisation/group workshops (e.g. Rainbow Writers and Illustrators and Sexual Violence Centre), Zine Makers Conversations Series with invited speakers, age-specific workshops, a focused workshop for fellow Sample-Studios Members and open zine-making sessions for the public.

The outcome of these programmed events will be exhibited within Triskel Sample Project Space and will include a Zine library to showcase the zines made by all the participants. The room will continue to have an open zine-making station for the general public of Triskel to interact with. The festival itself will include local and national stall holders, workshops, panel talks and a closing event. CZF has been developing and growing a strong and constant following and track record with a strong core team since 2018. It is their hope that with the opportunity of the residency that they could give CZF the focus it needs as a project and expand it even further.

“Working in Triskel Sample Project Space in 2025 will enable us to look to the future and the potential to invite international zine makers to host talks and workshops, expanding the community and adding to the overall skills development and zine discourse.”

Triskel Sample Project Space is a new partnership between Triskel and Sample-Studios that will provide a visual arts project space for artists, especially emerging and mid-career artists, to test ideas and to develop new work that can be seen by the public. This offers tangible career development and audience engagement opportunities to artists on their ‘home turf’ where they have a safe space to develop new ideas, within which risk-taking is possible.

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