Zine Project
Zines have a long history in radical and activist communities. They are small, self-made publications that circulate through specific networks, where contributors attend closely to how meaning is shaped and where activist knowledge is accessible. The Black Feminist Eco Lab, as a space for Black feminist collaboration and practice, recognizes the importance of zines and creates them to bring together work from contributors across different places and practices. Each issue engages life within environments that meet and shape one another, tracing how lives, systems, and struggles are bound together across contexts.
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This zine grew out of a sustained interest in Black women’s presence not as representation, but as something that persists and continues to do work across time. We were drawn to photographs that sit in the space between intimacy and archive: family images, public images, images that were never meant to be historical but have become so simply by surviving.
As we gathered these photographs, we became increasingly aware that presence does not end with death. Many of the women pictured here are no longer living. Yet their images remain active and capable of shaping how the present understands itself and imagines what comes next. These photographs do not simply document the past; they intervene in the present and quietly orient the future.
The eighth image is of Lab member River Schuman’s aunt. While collecting photographs for this project, they learned that she had passed away years earlier, long before they knew to look for her. And yet they found her anyway. This raised a question that sits at the center of the zine: what is it that leads us to certain images, people, and presences, even after they are gone? What kind of force allows Black women to remain discoverable through continuity?
This zine understands Black women’s presence as something carried forward, whether deliberately, accidentally, or even sometimes by strangers who come later and feel compelled to gather what remains. The work here is about acknowledging that Black women are already doing temporal work: waiting, returning, reappearing, and shaping futures they will never see.
In this sense, the zine is both a gathering and a gesture outward, recognizing that these images will one day be found again, reassembled by another seeker, and made to speak in ways I cannot anticipate. That, to us, is the quiet power of Black women’s presence, not finished, but ongoing.