Before cyberspace there was a piece of paper, a bedroom, a photocopier and a stamp. The Fanzine has always attracted the disassociated, disenfranchised and the disaffected.

The network of zines embedded within a larger underground culture, create a collective space for young people to tell their own stories, debate and have dialogue. As the mainstream market is saturated with products for youth consumers, products representing a homogenous view of what youth want, think and feel, zine producers have reacted by creating alternative sites for expression and a distinctive aesthetics in the media marketplace. Zines challenge and reinvent images of youth and youth culture prevalent in mainstream media, and expose the powerful aesthetics and political sensibilities of young people in contemporary media culture. The forthcoming exhibition Global Bedroom Communications, (the church on Grosvenor St, Manchester M1) will show work ranging from Bunny Rabbit, dotted with sandpaper and accompanied by a free tape of self-strummed guitar music, and Chimps, a diary of a Brighton skate girl, to The Epitaph, a journal of fatal statistics.

British youth culture over the past years has lacked an underground movement which has challenged mainstream cultural and political authority. Todayâs independent voices of youth culture are being sourced for media manipulation faster than we've ever seen. The mediaâs impression of the voice of youth is written through every product promising vitality and energy to people well past their sell by date. Youth belongs to the young ö it is a time for re-negotiating rules, expectations and identities and it is violent, complex and subtle not a unifying deafening shout. Nothing's special anymore. The super-club, the super-pub, the super-league. After the commercialisation of dance music came the policing of its territories and the championing of British 'indie' music by the state in some bizarre P.R. act to sell Britain to the world. Youth culture is in a constant process of being tapped and trapped, leaving no space for internal dialogue; zine makers are re-negotiating the commercial representations of themselves with humour, irony and honesty... Find your own time.

Global Bedroom Communications: A reading of contemporary youth culture through the work of UK and US fanzine makers ö opens May 28th on Grosvenor St, Manchester M1

Graham Clayton-Chance [G.P.Clayton-Chance@design-practice.salford.ac.uk]