📓 From Grimoire to Street: Materialising Youth Policy through Podcast, Platform and Protest

If the tarot is a map of archetypes,
the grimoire is the book that teaches you how to use them.
One reads the moment.
The other prepares you for what comes next.

In the second chapter of Youth Mental Health Beyond Borders, our digital grimoire. aka digital fanzine, took shape not as a summary, but as an extension of the legislative theater crash course. A space to hold the echoes, fragments, spells, refusals and provocations that emerged during and after the Legislative Theater process.  It picked up threads from the podcast series developed by young people in Barcelona and Manchester, extending their voices and weaving their demands into new forms of symbolic intervention.

Historically, grimoires were manuals of ritual and resistance. They documented secret knowledge: formulas for protection, recipes for healing, ways to navigate hostile systems. The tarot, often bound up with these traditions, was never just a divinatory tool. It was a symbolic language for sensing power, identifying danger, and imagining possibility.

In the second chapter of Youth Mental Health Beyond Borders, our digital grimoire took shape not as a summary, but as an extension of the theater. A space to hold the echoes, fragments, spells, refusals and provocations that emerged during and after the Legislative Theater process.

Historically, grimoires were manuals of ritual and resistance. They documented secret knowledge: formulas for protection, recipes for healing, ways to navigate hostile systems. The tarot, often bound up with these traditions, was never just a divinatory tool. It was a symbolic language for sensing power, identifying danger, and imagining possibility.

We treated the fanzine, podcast and visual posters in the same way.

Each proposal discussed in the podcast (and later uploaded to the Decidim platform), especially those touching on housing, intersectionality, and care, found its echo in symbolic cards, slogans, and story fragments. But also in posters and visuals we created to be held in the air, inspired by the direct, political, and embodied tone of Camille Aumont Carnel in her book “Être raciste, c'est quoi?” from the ALT Collection Series of short, powerful, and thought-provoking essays for 15–25-year-olds

We channeled that energy into a series of  Platoniq-designed protest posters and data visualisations, some of them inspired by famous Manchester’s band posters and album Covers including:

• “I don’t lack resilience. I lack residence.”

• “I am not an expert on racism I am an expert in all the times they tried to fuck me over”

• Infographic-style posters on youth climate anxiety, with bold black and red visuals that combined raw stats with symbolic weight.

We imagined the fanzine not just as media, but as a manual of mutual care.
A space for collective mental health self- and mutual defense.
A low-tech, high-impact flipside of policy,  full of tactics, metaphors, and collective tools for change.

Some formats include QR codes linking to the Decidim policy tracker, closing the loop between youth demands and institutional responsibility. A slogan in the street could lead to a proposal. A podcast quote could become a manifesto. A tarot card could point toward implementation.

In the Cover Story Canvas activity, participants imagined future headlines:

“Facilitating the revolution”
“Housing is a right, not a privilege”
They identified core messages:
“Know your rights. Be resolute.”
“Policy makers should support us by pulling the right strings.”
And summarised the spirit of the zine in quotes like:
“Together, young people can lead the way for policymakers.”

These weren’t just exercises, they were the seeds of campaign strategy. In the "Next Steps" plan for the zine, the group mapped multiple futures:

• Send the zine to policymakers, landlords, charities

• Write to journalists

• Share it on social media to reach other youth

• Bring it to protests and classrooms

• Start a zineletter
  And keep testing and sharing the tarot cards themselves

Because this grimoire, like all grimoires, is messy, magical, and strategic.
A record of pain, yes. But also tactics.
A toolkit for future disruptions.
A commons of care in a language no system can fully capture.

The fanzine is not a recap.
It’s not a souvenir.
It’s a grimoire.

It’s the part of the process that doesn’t wait for permission.
It’s how we carry the theater back into the world.

Because the play doesn’t end when the curtain falls.
Sometimes it begins again in your hands
folded like a zine,
spoken like a spell,
held high like a sign.