BEYOND Zine 2026
The BEYOND Zine is a creative reporting tool that is designed to harvest, contextualise, and amplify the voices emerging from the Culture Action Europe Satellite BEYOND gatherings in 2026.
Each Satellite will produce its own digital zine, gathering stories, reflections, practices, demands, and creative responses from the people and communities connected to each region.
In addition to documenting each event, the zines will bring the knowledge, expertise, and lived realities of the cultural sector more intentionally into CAE’s advocacy.
We are accepting submissions any time before 24 May. (More details below ↓)
Note: please read the Data Protection Notice at the bottom of this page before submitting your contribution to the BEYOND Zine.
What is a zine?
A zine is a self-published and accessible publication often used to share ideas, experiences, images, and calls to action outside more formal publishing structures.
Historically, zines have been used by artists, activists, and communities to spread information and organise collectively, making space for voices that are often left out of mainstream conversations.
What’s inside?
Context and local realities
This section goes into the specific regional context of the Satellite. This is the situated knowledge chapter. It shows how cultural realities differ across Europe while still illuminating shared patterns.
🦋 You can share local realities and tensions, reflections on the current condition of the cultural sector, personal testimonies, descriptions of what is often unseen or misunderstood from outside the region, and place-based material like photos, maps, walks, neighbourhood observations…
Pressures and challenges
This section names the structural conditions shaping cultural life. What we’re up against. This section should create a powerful archive of recurring structural issues that can directly underpin more formal policy framing.
🦋 You can share discussions about precarity, shrinking civic space, underfunding, cracks in democracy, inequality in access and visibility, political pressure on culture, burnout, exclusion, censorship, isolation, or other barriers emerging locally….
Practices, responses, and what is being built
This section focuses on responses, practices, and experiments already happening. It shows what responses communities are already building. For advocacy, this is essential because it helps CAE argue not only for what is wrong, but for what deserves recognition, protection, and support.
🦋 You can share concrete practices, community initiatives, artistic interventions, mutual aid, collaboration, organising, and alternative infrastructures, methods people are using to hold communities together or make change possible, Socially-engaged arts practices…
Ideas, demands, and what should move forward
This section gathers demands and recommendations. It should be the bridge into advocacy actions. The goal is to make this a collective political resource.
🦋 You can share recommendations for policy and practice, messages to the next BEYOND gathering, demands to institutions, calls to peers across Europe, open questions that should shape future work, reflections on what participants are taking home and what should happen next, Manifestoes…
What we are collecting
We welcome many different types of contributions, including:
- Photos from the event
- Short essays or reflections
- Quotes, fragments, or notes from discussions
- Speeches or keynotes from the event
- Policy recommendations or demands
- Maps or mapping of the area, walks or tours
- Descriptions of concrete practices and experiments
- Poems, visual work, sketches, or photographs
- Video or audio contributions (or excerpts)
- Manifestos or declarations
- Open questions that remain unresolved
- Other contributions that help express the realities, ideas, and needs of the cultural sector
- Any other creative idea!
You do not need to be attending a Satellite event to contribute.
Need help thinking of an idea?
How we will create and share
CAE will collect content before and during each Satellite event. Each zine will be shared publicly on the CAE website and social media after the Satellite events. Contributions to the zine might also be referenced or published standalone in CAE reporting or blogposts for future dissemination outside the scope of the Satellites.
How to submit
Send your contribution by email to: thegarden@cultureactioneurope.org
- Include the following information in your submission:
Name - Organisation (if applicable)
- Email Address
- City/Country/Region
- Anything you’d like us to know about your submission
- Attach, paste or link your submission in the email
We are accepting submissions any time before 24 May.
Contributions can be (and are encouraged to be!) submitted in their original language. English translations are welcome but not required.
Note: please read the Data Protection Notice below before submitting your contribution to the BEYOND Zine.
Data Protection Notice
The personal data collected via email for participation in the BEYOND Zine (name, contact details, organisation, location and related information) will be processed solely for the purpose of creating and disseminating the BEYOND Zine. Your data will not be used for marketing purposes and will not be transferred to third parties. Personal data will be retained only for as long as necessary for the creation and dissemination of the event, after which it will be securely deleted.
Please note that contributions submitted for the BEYOND Zine, including text, images, audiovisual content etc., may be made publicly available online as part of the publication and dissemination of the BEYOND Zine. By contributing to the BEYOND Zine, you understand that your contribution may be included in both the final publication and its dissemination.
You have the right to request access to your personal data, to request rectification or erasure, and to restrict or object to processing in accordance with applicable EU data protection legislation. For any questions regarding the processing of your data, please contact: thegarden@cultureactioneurope.org
By contributing to the BEYOND Zine, you confirm that you have read and understood this data protection notice.