Our first Zinedabaad workshop began as a goodbye party and became a joyful act of collective creation during the anti-CAA/NRC protests.

"Riya: We held the event at Lamakaan, a beautiful cultural centre with big trees and this great canteen with cheap, delicious food. We knew very few people in Hyderabad, so no one came. So, as Devashree set up the room, I went from table to table in the canteen area with two zines saying, hey, do you want to come for a workshop? People obviously had a lot of questions. I think I answered them because nearly all of them joined us.

Devashree: We played a banging playlist and dumped a whole lot of newspapers and art supplies across a row of tables. Having access to a non-judgemental space of creation—you could feel palpable joy in the room. Absolute strangers who had no idea what was going on not only joined, but stuck around for two, three hours. In the middle of this workshop, we had to go buy more supplies. It was lightning in a bottle. Something magical happened in that room. Sustaining that feeling really became what pushed us to do more.

Riya: We started our Instagram page because people had made such beautiful things and we wanted to document it somewhere. And we came up with a name because we had to name the page." - Folding in: A Conversation with Zinedabaad Collective on Joy, Artistic Expression, and Building Community through Zines, an interview by Winnu D