Zine making is a tactic for sharing stories, practices, and situated knowledges between riparian territories. Zines are small, independently produced publications that bring together images, texts, stories, and other forms of knowledge. They can be made collectively, reproduced and shared outside conventional publishing structures, and easily carried from one place to another. For Riparian Struggles, zine making is not only a way of documenting struggles around rivers and water bodies, but a creative practice that can itself become part of these struggles.

Salve Saracura in São Paulo, Laptek Apung in Jakarta, and the Floating University in Berlin are among the Riparian Struggles members working with such practices of making, sharing, and circulating. Their work shows how creative forms can become part of struggles for water: connecting people, making otherwise hidden ecologies visible, and creating spaces in which different forms of knowledge can meet. The Riparian Struggles zine brings together creative stories of urban struggles for rivers and water bodies from across the network, focusing on the tactics developed by collectives defending their waters.

The zine connects to the three Planetary Strategies: corresponding, evidencing, and circulating. These strategies take different forms across the stories gathered in the zine. Floating University, for example, used story circulation by filling its zine with stories of tactics encountered and engaged with in São Paulo, Brazil. Salve Saracura drew on situated knowledge in the making of its zine, using a folding technique already practiced by Samba Schools in Bixiga during the 1970s. In Jakarta, Laptek Apung made zine making itself part of their struggle. By bringing together such stories and tactics, the zine evidences riparian struggles that have become hidden or silenced, while un-earthing ecologies of resistance around water bodies towards a horizon of care, repair, and healing. At the same time, it creates opportunities for these tactics to be shared, adapted, and developed further elsewhere.

The most recent zine was made by Débora and Fabrício from Estúdio Agudo and Gráfica Experimental in São Paulo. Its making involved translating diverse materials, stories, and practices from the different territories of Riparian Struggles into a shared physical object. Cutting, folding, printing, and assembling thus become part of the tactic itself, giving the gathered knowledge a tangible form and the possibility to travel.

On 15 July 2026, we celebrated the launch of the zine at Floating University in Berlin. The launch brought together many of the people and practices that have shaped Riparian Struggles and marked the beginning of the zine’s circulation rather than its endpoint. The zine also includes postcards that invite people to display their own stories and practices. These can travel between the different riparian sites, carrying stories from one territory to another and creating material connections between them.

Further launches are planned in the riparian territories connected to the project, where the publication can be encountered, discussed, and transformed in relation to different local struggles.