What is 6 ISLANDS zine?

Image of 6 ISLANDS team. From left to right you have Ichmarah, Danick, and Alexine

6 ISLANDS team from left to right: Ichmarah, Danick, Alexine

6 ISLANDS zine is an initiative born out of the need to talk about the position of the 6 islands — Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, St. Eustatius and St. Maarten – within the so-called “Kingdom of the Netherlands”. From an intersectional approach we explore the experiences of Afro descendants and Indigenous Peoples currently part of the ABCSSS Community. We uncover the impacts of the colonial legacy on the everyday to collectively re-imagine and construct a decolonial future together.

We aim to build community and a movement around the 6 ISLANDS – with a yearly zine as a means of archiving collective and individual ways of decolonization. Throughout the year we organize workshops, book-club events, movie screenings, talks and more! 6 ISLANDS is co-convened by Ichmarah, Alexine, and Danick.

Caribbean people, Let’s speak up!📣

Ichmarah Kock

Ichmarah (she/her or they/them) is queer and from Aruba, a community organizer with multifaceted artistic expressions, and enjoys her embodied theatrics. She is founder of 6 ISLANDS collective, responsible for the production, technical infrastructure, and visual designs, of the project, and has been co-organizing events centering shared experiences of ABCSSS communities. She is also founder of Ban Topa Artist Meetup Aruba that aims to create (digital) spaces for visual artists within the Aruban community.

For Ichmarah, 6 ISLANDS started as a search for collective resistance within the ABCSSS-diaspora and communal sense of belonging. It has been an ongoing, developing collective space for decolonial imaginations, (un)learning of (shared) experiences and knowledge, and collective joy. Zine-making has always been for Ichmarah an artistically fulfilling and a playful, immersive means of activating or disrupting streams of thoughts collectively and individually.

Image of Alexine from 6 ISLANDS initiative

Alexine Gabriela

Alexine Gabriela (Alex — she/her) is a queer Afro-Caribbean femme, zinester and community organizer based in Amsterdam. Her approach to activism is decolonial and intersectional and she advocates specifically for Afro-Caribbeans from the ABCSSS islands. She is co- founder of the collective 6 ISLANDS and of the reading group BPOC Bookclub. Finally, Alex is a creative researcher, having researched topics around Blackness and (Dutch) colonial history, for different organizations like Black Speaks Back and the Black Archives.

Within 6 ISLANDS Alex facilitates internal discussion and brainstorm sessions around the topics and events that 6 ISLANDS explore collectively, and she helps with event organization and production. For Alex this project is an essential source of life energy. As someone who once sought similar spaces when she was younger, it is incredibly fulfilling to be able to co-create where others be radically themselves. To see all of us come together to (un)learn, to dream and to make other realities possible has been life changing.

Danick Trouwloon

Danick Trouwloon (she/her), born and raised on Curaçao, is a queer, Afro-Caribbean researcher, community-organizer, and lover of all things literary. Passionate about equality, justice, and sustainability, she works as a PhD candidate researching the societal impact of sustainability research on Curaçao.

Danick joined 6 ISLANDS zine in the summer of 2021, where she is engaged in event organizing, as well as copy editing for the collective’s zine, website, email, and social media. Since becoming part of the 6 ISLANDS zine community, Danick has seen how much the collective fosters a sense of belonging within this diasporic community. Danick loves being part of 6 ISLANDS zine, because it gives her both a source of intense joy, as well as an opportunity to lovingly pour this joy back into the community.