Rock Retreat launches magazine following zine making project

The Rock Retreat has launched a magazine following a zine making project and exhibitions featuring artists from Gibraltar and the Caribbean.

Zines are self-published booklets and for this project they were themed on ‘home’ and what home meant to the artists and writers.

The project was organised by Eleanor Dobbs, who held an exhibition of the zines in Gibraltar last year, and decided to turn this into a magazine detailing the process.

Ms Dobbs described how the magazine holds the full story of this hope filled zine making project.

The zine project invited women from Gibraltar and around the world to respond to a call for artists and writers.

The exhibition ‘Home’ was first exhibited at St Vincent, the Grenadines and in Gibraltar to celebrate International Women’s Day and over 60 zines were created.

The collection then travelled to Vienna and to ICA London, the magazine brings together all that work.

Ms Dobbs said it had been a year-long journey and began after a call out was made in St Vincent.

“We heard that call out and wanted to involve our community of women here in Gibraltar,” she said.

“That grew also into a global community of women through the Rock Retreat and the Gibraltar Cultural Services and the Commonwealth Foundation.”

“They shared each other's information and women started to send in their stories.”

“Now a lot of people say, why zines? Now the reason for the zines is we wanted to participate in an exhibition on the other side of the Atlantic in the Caribbean.”

“How are we going to get our art and our words and our stories there? And how are they going to get their art and words and stories to us? And having had quite a keen interest in zines ourselves, we thought, well that's obvious, a click of a button, a quick photograph of your A4 piece of work that could be turned into a zine is so easy and transportable and cheap.”

“There's the actual tactile satisfaction of when you print it out and you fold it and you cut that bit down the middle and you create it into a little book.”

Ms Dobbs added that zines invite people to share their story and some for the first time. She described how women submitted audio recordings with stories of their lives.

“You heard babies crying in the background and chickens in the garden scratching around, and people were singing songs from their childhood,” Ms Dobbs said.

“People were talking about grandmothers and ancestors and places that meant things to them.”

“Those voices were like the audio embodiment of the scene. Their personal nature really spoke.”

She added this embodied the year-long project and pulls together the different threads of their lives.

“I think we are very keen to make sure that this incredible collection of scenes and the stories within this magazine are held in a collection,” Ms Dobbs said.

“We're now going to take our magazine around and promote it, and hopefully touch other people and encourage other people to keep telling their stories.”

She added that the Rock Retreat is really excited to keep going with this scale of project and get people in Gibraltar zine making even more.

She also thanked Ruthine Burton who helped her put together the magazine.

Thanks to the support of the Commonwealth Foundation the project has been able to gather zines, stories, anecdotes, poetry and song from across the globe.

In the pages readers will find the work of zine makers alongside other contributors and images from the exhibitions.

There are links to the audio and quotes taken from those precious recordings.

Ms Dobbs thanked Gibraltar Cultural Services for funding the project so that they could able to give each contributor a free copy of the magazine. The magazines are available at the GEMA Gallery.