Blue Bodies: Shaping the Colours That We Are Seen Through

How have different Black and POC groups taken the language surrounding them into their own hands? Esther Fatoye — poet, visual artist, community organizer and founder of the Dublin-based literary platform Black Tones — will discuss the process of reclaiming old titles and reforming them to mean something new.

"The tools that we use to reshape words are simply words and other open-minds", she writes. The Irish term Daoine Gorm, for example, literally translates into "Blue People". It has been historically used to reference Black people in Ireland, but has since been almost forgotten. Esther proposes to reclaim and redefine the term, as a means to expand the understanding of selves in a national and global context.

As a publisher of Blue Bodies, a biannual publication featuring Black-Irish writing and visual art, she sees zines in an important position to bring communities around the world together "to reshape the words that have defined them throughout the years." The aim is to create a more fulfilling language around identity. "Zines specifically have been popular within subcultures because it is independent of the global perception of said subculture. We are now in a time where those same zines are informing the global narrative" — and at the same time crucial for archiving community work.