Summer!

Kia Ora and Happy New Year!

The Freedom Shop is back open on Saturdays and sometimes on Wednesdays (when we feel like it). We still have some Plan B diaries for 2021 ($10), so come in and get one or contact us, so you can plan the revolution.

 

Ōtaki Summer Camp is back! Three days of politics, discussion, speakers, music, bush, rivers and sea, in the beach community of Ōtaki, north of Wellington. Ōtaki Summer Camp is for people aged 17- 30 with an interest in politics, justice, anti-racism, equality and the environment. 22nd-25th Hānuere/January 2021.

Speakers include Behrouz Boochani, Laura O’Connell Rapira and Anjum Rahman.

There will be no stalls this year, but there will be a library that will include some books and zines from the Freedom Shop.

https://otakisummercamp.com/

Sweet Release pop up stall

We are having a one-day-only pop up stall at Sweet Release on:

Saturday the 19th of December 10am - 4pm.

Stock up on Christmas reading and gifting, then get some good vegan kai.

Our stock will include:
- Books: anarchy, anti-racism, decolonisation, radical histories, radical futures, climate action, veganism, you name it.
- 'Plan B' 2021 diaries
- Zines! So many radical zines
- Badges and patches
- Tote Bags

 

SUMMER BLESSING: Creative Workshops and Market

Wellington Zinefest presents Summer Blessing: a full day of creativity to manifest a season of inspiration and abundance.

Summer Blessing is our last event of the year, a pagan / solstice / folk-themed day of workshops and a zine market.

Come along from 10am to take part in our creation stations. You can learn to press flowers, make badges, screen print and harness the power of the sun with cyanotype. These sessions are low key, no reservations and they’ll be running simultaneously.

At 1.00 as the sun is high we will have a small market where you can swap and buy zines, art and spells from local zine makers, get your image in ink from Arden and pull a card or two.
Our market runs until 5.

We welcome you with open sketchbooks and invite you to bring your best energy as we respectfully nod to the celestial factors that keep our ball of dirt spinning.

Feel free to wear your special occasion robes and BYO drinks, runes, tarot cards and talismans.

Artwork by Darcy Woods.

Saturday, 12 December 2020 10am to 5pm

At the Newtown Community Hall, corner of Daniell St and Constable St, Newtown (note this is not the Newtown Community Centre on Rintoul St!).

The Freedom Shop will be running a screen printing workshop - We will have screens and a variety of pre-cut stencils, ready for printing. If you have an old shirt or bag you'd like to print on - bring it! Otherwise we'll have blank tote bags you can buy and print on for cheap. Hands on workshop - stop by whenever you can and try screen printing.

Kid-friendly and fun!

Radical Zine Series - Volume 1 Launch

Help celebrate and launch the first four Radical Zines re-designed and re-purposed in a collaboration between Wellington Zinefest and the Freedom Shop.

When: Thursday, 10 December at 6pm

Where: at the Freedom Shop - in Opportunities for Animals, 162 Riddiford St, Newtown

We selected classic zines from our archives for a creative reimagining. With the help of donors from a Boosted campaign, four local illustrators were commissioned to reimagine these relatively simple, text-heavy zines into fully illustrated beautiful works!

The radical zine redesign project has helped make the important ideas within these zines even more accessible. We'll be selling the redesigned texts and cheaply as possible so that we can share their learnings with as many people as possible.

The four zines are:

• Are We All New Zealanders Now? by Dr Ani Mikaere, redesigned by Izzy Joy
• "The Problem With White Saviours" by Simone Kaho, redesigned by Kata Brown
• Rongoā by Emily Tuhi-Ao Bailey, redesigned by Jamie Terekia
• The Tyranny of The Clock by George Woodcock, redesigned by George Naylor

On the night, we'll have the zines available for sale.

These four zines are the first volume in this series, but there will be a second round, too! On the evening we'll announce the next four zines to be re-designed, and together with ZineFest we'll be seeking more illustrators and designers to help bring to life to more classic and new zines.

Plan B Diaries 2021

The Plan B diaries for 2021 are here! For the third year, the Freedom Shop has produced a diary highlighting dates of Aotearoa's radical (or ignored) history. 

Get yours from the shop or at Zinefest this weekend for $10 (the Freedom Shop will be there on Sunday). If you can't make it in person, send us an email and we will post one to you.

We also have a range of new tote bags for $7.

Zinefest 2020

This year's Zinefest is slightly earlier than normal - it's on the weekend of 10-11 October, 12-4pm with and accesibility hour from 11 to 12 on both days, and this time it is at the Vic Uni School of Design at 139 Vivian St. The Freedom Shop will have a stall on Sunday, 11 Oct. 

David Graeber

2020 has been full of death and grief, and one more person has died. In the first week of September, David Graeber, anarchist, author, activist, anthropologist and historian, died suddenly. 

Graeber's books included: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which first started off as an article in Strike! Magazine, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and Direct Action: An Ethnography, plus The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. He was also one of the editors of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Transformation. Just one quick online search reveals so many journals and articles by Graeber, inlcuding in Rolling Thunder The Shock of Victory: An Analysis of Our Unclaimed Triumphs - there are also books due to be published later this year, including one co-written with his partner 'What are Kings'. 

 

“Debt is the most efficient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent inequality and make them seem right and proper.”

"The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger."  

 

"Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives."

 

"...in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic."

 

At the Freedom Shop we still have Possibilities ($32), Revolutions in Reverse ($25) and Constituent Imagination ($31) but a lot of his work can be found online, check out the Anarchist Library, Libcom and especially his own website: https://davidgraeber.industries/ 

 

David Graeber - "Are You an Anarchist?"