OPEN CALL - ZINE ISSUE #2:

“ You Fight the War with Guns,
We Fight the Peace with Stories”

The second issue of A4CT is on its way. This time, the issue will be shared both online and as a physical zine, distributed throughout the city of Helsinki and available for PDF download, so it can be shared anywhere.

We want to offer a platform for micro-stories: those fragments that are often silenced, censored, or afraid to emerge. Too often, narratives are twisted, reshaped, or cut to fit into accepted formats. With this zine, we want to create space for stories as they are: unpolished, unfiltered, and true to the people who carry them.

This zine refuses to conform to the tyranny of what dominant media calls “moral correctness”, used as an excuse to silence dissent and dictate which voices and narratives are allowed to be heard or seen. By gathering diverse stories from around the world shaped in multiple formats, this zine aims to challenge the echo chambers and algorithm-driven narratives of the digital world that keep us numb, passive, and divided.

We invite you to dare to be honest with yourself and your story, we want to offer a platform for narratives that don’t easily fit into conventional spaces, and we want to invite you to give them form through words, visuals, or any form of expression suitable for a zine.

Contributions can be submitted under your real name, a pen name, or completely anonymously. Our goal is to create an *uncensored* zine, easily printed, distributed, and shared. 

Formats:

- Text (ie: manifestos, recipes, short essays, poetry, fiction, shopping list, to-do list, or any other form that fits into a zine). Max. to 700 words so that it fits  in 2 pages (A5) per submission.

- Visual works (ie: sketches, drawings, mini-comics, screenshots, photographs, memes, collages, illustrations, corecore, or any other form that fits into a zine). B&W or color. Visual works should fit 2 pages A5 or 2-page spread (side-by-side A5 pages).

- Hybrid/experimental formats welcome.

- See some examples of zines here and in ISSUU.
- Find more info about zine culture here.

How to submit:

Send your contribution to artivism4ct (at) proton.me  
before the 01.12.2025
Length: Max 2 pages (A5) per submission

* A4CT runs entirely on a volunteer basis. There is no grant or funding behind this initiative, and therefore we are currently unable to provide financial compensation for submissions. We are looking for independent entities to partner with for this publication and bring it to life through a community-driven approach, with the goal of expanding the reach of the zine while keeping it independent and uncensored. We hope to find support in the future to compensate contributors for their collaborations.