The Other Worlds Subscription Quarterly Annual Mailout (SQAM) is a zine subscription service. For a one-off payment of $82 you receive a quarterly (every three months) curated pack of zines loosely collected around a theme. There will be four packs in total, per subscription.
The first pack drops in January 2021 and is titled “City as Might Have Been”.
Subscriptions were limited to 50 subscribers and are now closed.
Originally published in 2015, reprinted (its third run) for SQAM Kyle Magee explains his interventions on public, for-profit advertisements, actions which usually involve the defacement of ad space, done openly in public, which end in his arrest. The manifesto, told through stark and frenetically drawn comics by Michael Fikaris, lays out why for-profit advertising, in addition to being an unconscionable waste of resources, has such a detrimental effect on our media systems, corrupting our politics and personal lives in service of capitalism.
“I’m the opposite of the anchor, drifting around. I used to worry about this but have come to accept it’s my way. To be at the periphery rather than the centre, to feel in the moment but also incessantly elsewhere, thinking of other times and places and possibilities. In this scene I’m in the grey morning under the overcast sky, the soles of my shoes crushing the jacaranda flowers into the pavement, but I’m also out to sea, the anchor hoisted, the ship cutting through the steel blue water.” I am a Camera is a zine series by Vanessa Berry, started in 1999. This issue, from 2016, is a drift through Sydney’s past, present and future.
Ill Considered is a series of zines exploring Sydney’s brutalist architecture and focussing on those we know are at risk of being razed. In each zine we profile a certain building through words, photos and illustration.
In our first zine we journey to Lidcombe, Sydney, home of the old Department of Mineral Resources building. It’s now abandoned, fenced off and kept watch by a series of CCTV cameras ensuring that it remains empty and useless. Only 250 printed!
What to name this thing that I do, then? This is not an act of remembering or submerging into nostalgia. I wish to engage in a kind of autobiographical writing that identifies which of the city’s many undercurrents penetrated my thick skin and flowed through me, and that traces the ways in which urban habitation in a certain place and time made this body of mine mutate from one state into another: from an adolescent body into an adult body, from a poetic body into an academic body, from an agoraphilic body into a claustrophilic body.
What I am doing is not so much psychogeography as –