QYAC Workshop: Language of Home - Archiving words through zine-making

A workshop exploring language, belonging, and queer memory through small acts of archiving. We’ll begin with a short, informal intro on why archives matter - especially for queer and diasporic communities whose stories are often missing from official records.

Participants will then create small folding zines using writing, drawing, collage, or crossed-out language, reflecting on words they carry, words they want to release, and words they want to keep. These pages become small personal records of language and belonging.

Participants can keep their zines, or (if they want) leave one page to contribute to a temporary collective language archive within The Hanging Archive exhibition.

About the artist

Adan Abu Dalu is a Palestinian curator, creative producer, and architect based in London. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between exhibitions, workshops, sound, and collaborative research, often focusing on language, memory, and displacement. She recently completed an MA in Curating Contemporary Design at Kingston University in collaboration with the Design Museum. Adan works with care-led, participatory formats that support reflection, gentle conversation, and small collective archives created through creative making.

AboutQueer Youth Art Collective (QYAC)

This workshop is part of the Queer Youth Art Collective exhibition What Was, What Is, What Could Be- an exhibition by Queer Youth Art Collective (QYAC) following on from their three-month residency at Camberwell Space.

Queer Youth Art Collective is the UK’s only national LGBTQIA+ youth service working specifically in the arts. During their Camberwell Space residency, creatives aged between 18-28 were selected through an open call and introduced to what a studio practice could look like. This included workshops and mentorship from technicians as well as other members of staff at Camberwell College of Arts.

This exhibition marks a turning point, handing the reins of the organisation over to the young artists, alumni and community which has surrounded QYAC. Since 2019, QYAC has curated four group exhibitions with hundreds of queer artists from across the UK including at Bluecoat Liverpool, Glasgow Zine Fest, Curious Arts Newcastle, Studio Voltaire and QUEERCIRCLE.

The work of the residents in the exhibition will be accompanied by an archive of seven years of QYAC, curated in partnership with The Museum of Transology (MoT). The archive will then move to Bishopsgate Institute following the show.

Alongside this, a newly commissioned textiles piece called The Hanging Archivewill be in display, co-produced by QYAC attendees, facilitators and alumni as well as contributions from The Brunswick Centre LGBTQ+ yOUTh Service (Kirklees and Calderdale), Out Together (Leeds), HuGG Huddersfield Gay Group, Frutti Tutti (Leeds), Proud Terriers (Huddersfield), and Curious Arts Middlesbrough Curious Young Creatives.

In the words of QYAC - ‘We refuse censorship or judgement. In doing so we make more art possible’.

With generous support from Arts Council England, David Family Foundation, UAL and Awards for All.

For more information about the residency: www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/camberwell-college-of-arts/whats-on/camberwell-space/queer-youth-art-collective