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 brings the three Planetary Strategies – corresponding, evidencing, and circulating – into conversation. It circulates stories of tactics encountered and engaged with across the different territories, as practiced by the Floating University in their Reeder (Zine) where they brought stories of water struggles from their visit in São Paulo to Berlin in 2024.

It brings situated forms of knowledge into correspondence- for example, the folding technique used by the local samba school Vai-Vai in the 1970s has been taken up by Salve Saracura for their Zine design.

And it proposes the zine itself as an interactive workshop material, as we learned from Labtek’s way of using zines as practical guides for evidencing water qualities. By bringing such stories and practices together, the zine creates ways for tactics to travel, 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.