KL zine fest 2010 the report

The Kuala Lumpur Zine Fest 2010 was planned to be on 25th July in conjunction with worldwide zine month which is celebrated on July. Many zine-related events happen all over the world on this month. A few weeks before the event, I went around town distributing flyers and also posted it online. A lot of people asked whether it’s really happening so I took it as a good sign.

Ben gave an idea to do something like 24 hours zine making. But instead taking 24 hours to finish the contribution, I figured they should do it on the spot. So I name the activity on the spot zine making.

On the day itself, as soon as I woke up I went to buy a pack of pens and cut a few A4 papers into half. I went to fetch Kudin at Bangsar and we headed to the venue, Noisy Warehouse. Noisy is a space a community space where a lot of activities like gigs, screening and DIY events been held.

Some punks spent the night there after the gig the night before. Some were still sleeping. After filling my belly, I went inside to help cleaning the space, setting up the tables and prepare for the event. Three girls were early and bought many zines. Two of them are from neighboring country; Thailand.

The event officially started at 3.30pm. We had some light performances by one man show, The Chalat Chalat and two bands; Keladak and The Pips. As The Pips started their set, rain started pouring heavily. There was a surprise during The Pips set, the front woman Hana announced the birthday of Nunu who stays at Noisy. During these performances also we had ‘On the Spot zine making’. We provided some pens and papers for the participants to write or draw. We asked them to share a DIY recipe, a simple fixing skill or petua.

After The Pips’ set, we proceeded with screening of Joe Biel’s ‘$100 and a T-Shirt’ documentary movie about zine subculture in the states. Mat Norr suggested switching-off the lights so everyone would concentrate watching the movie and can proceed buying the zines after that. More and more kids arrived during the screening as the rain started to calm down a bit.

After the movie ended, we crowd proceed with buying and trading zines. We also had zine reading session. Azizi who released his latest issue of Bebal zine read some excerpts from that and previous issues. Mat Norr read about his surgery experience from Scenery Is Free latest issue. I read Ben’s writing from my latest issue, Mosh #13. Yuen who just released a zine Shock & Awe talked about the zine and read his writing. Salleh Bintang Kertas talked about why he did zines and lastly Alind read some poems from his zine and talked about Kudeta Collective. The whole event ended at 7.30 pm.

I can safely say the ‘fest’ was a success even though it feels more like a gathering of zines makers, readers, and friends rather than a fest. The name is just an exaggeration to make it feel grand anyway. See you at Kuala Lumpur Zine Fest next year, which hopefully would be better than this first attempt.