Open for Submission: Yuwana Zine

ASEAN Youth Forum (AYF) aims to accommodate the voices of young Southeast Asians. AYF believes that youth in the region has multiple life perspectives that can be expressed through creative processes and are worth-amplified further.

Therefore, AYF Secretariat is opening a submission for creative entries (visual, photographs, illustrations, poems, prose, writings, watercolor arts, basically anything) that would be bound into one zine that we will publish online, called YUWANA. Yuwana is derived from Sanskrit word yauvana meaning youth. It stands for young, uniting, witty, accessible, and non-discriminating activism. We hope through this zine-making process, we could build solidarity among youth in the region.

Yuwana: A Zine

Download Issue #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6 Here

Open submission until Friday, October 21, 2022, through here

Issue #7 of Yuwana will be published and exhibited in Celebration International Human Rights Day on December 2022.

Theme / Prompt: Human Rights, Grieve, and Loss (read theme statement below)

Curator:

Pychita Julinanda (Julie, he/they) is a neurodivergent transmasculine-genderfluid working class mainly laboring as a media and cultural worker. He has been involved in the Indonesian art scene since 2018 and traversed through the scene by working with other cultural collectives such as Jatiwangi art Factory (Jatiwangi, West Java), KUNCI Study Forum and Collective (Jogjakarta), LabTanya (Jakarta), Peretas (Indonesia), and other individual cultural activists. Besides artistic and cultural works, they are also involved in media environment.

They have worked as a freelance contributor/journalist at The Jakarta Post, contributed for Kumparan+, and are currently sneering at the system with Kroco TV, an Indonesian satire media platform where they write comic-based journalistic storytelling. They are now currently working on a climate-fiction solarpunk anthology as an artistic effort to reject dystopia by building a better reimagination of the collective future.

Theme Statement:

As our rights are violated, we experience loss. Sometimes we do not realize we lose something essential to our sense of beingness. Hence, we just move as life goes on without really giving ourselves a proper space to grieve. Some people grieve in silence, some grieve in support circles, and some grieve and find madenning energy that is very driving and find themselves in the circle of activism. A mother lost her child to an enforced disappearance in Indonesia and grieved and now organizes to seek justice for such human rights violations. An indigenous community lost their right to a culture and lands, they grieved, they did their cultural rites, and now organize advocacy movements for their rights. A survivor lost their sanity and sense of safety after experiencing sexual harassment(s), they grieve, and found light to help other survivors go through healing process. We lose, we grieve, and we organize. Do you ever experience loss? How has it affected your life? What messages do you wish to share?

We accept creative works from any individuals who

are between 15-35 years old
are a national of / living in Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, The Philippines, Thailand, Timor Leste, Vietnam, and other territories within Southeast Asia.
believe in the values of human rights, justice, democracy, and freedom (read The Yangon Declaration)

Guidelines:

Page dimension is 210mm x 148mm (A5, Portrait)

Art must correspond to the theme of "Human Rights, Grieve, and Loss" (see statement above)

One individual can submit any creative works (visual, photographs, illustrations, poems, prose, comic, meme, writings, watercolor arts, basically anything), in their native languages or English.

One submission must not be longer than 2-page space.

note: racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, ableist, or other works targeting specific groups of people will not be accepted. As we appreciate and respect artistic freedom, we don't tolerate any bigotry, hate, violence and discrimination in our community.

Before we publish, we will ask your consent and we will be finalizing the placement and set-up of your work in our final lay-out as we will also have some discussion over security concerns.

How to submit:

Fill out and upload your work through this form no later than October 15th, 2022

you can address any question to yuwana@aseanyouthforum.org