After the Movements

Welcome.

This series grows out of a zine that explores what remains after social movements fade from the headlines.

Photography: instagram @qiu.van

We often remember the dramatic moments — the protests, the clashes, the slogans — but what happens afterward? How do those experiences continue to shape the people who lived through them?

Through field notes, archives, and personal reflections, this zine traces the memories, emotions, and unfinished stories that persist long after the streets have fallen silent.

“…Although seven years have passed, many people still remember those days vividly.”

The story behind this publication begins on a September afternoon in 2019, in the midst of Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement. On Causeway Bay, the streets were filled with the traces of confrontation. Broken bank windows, damaged subway entrances, and luxury storefronts stood alongside burning trash bins. Valiant ran through the city while riot police fired rubber bullets from above. Water cannons swept across the roads as crowds scattered in every direction.

At the time, Hong Kong itself had become a battlefield. “Five demands, not one less” echoed through the streets, expressing both public anger and a deep desire for democratic participation.

In the years that followed, the movement gave way to a new era of intensified state control. Looking back now, this may appear as one episode within a broader history of urban struggles unfolding around the world. But for those who were there, the feeling was far more immediate.

It felt as if everything could collapse at any moment — and that was precisely why people fought with everything they had.

Then the pandemic arrived, and many districts across Hong Kong became prolonged sites of confrontation. The intensity of the conflict raised a difficult question: how did one of the world’s most prosperous financial hubs — a relatively small city often celebrated for its stability and global connectivity — reach this point?

instagram @qiu.van

At the time, I was a graduate student preparing an independent research project on infrastructure and urban transformation. My original plan was to document the transition from the Pearl River Delta to what is now known as the Greater Bay Area. But as our fieldwork unfolded, we gradually realized that we had stumbled upon some of the very conditions that had fueled this wave of unrest.

We found that the people participating in various forms of cultural and political action often came from both sides of the border. Across Hong Kong, local communities were already resisting large-scale development projects — from artificial island construction to urban renewal schemes in neighborhoods such as Kowloon City and Sham Shui Po. Beneath the surface, long-standing frustrations had been building for years.

What emerged in 2019 was not simply a reaction to a single policy proposal, but the reappearance of deeper demands for a more open and participatory society.

As the movement evolved, it generated an extraordinary range of leaderless and highly creative forms of action. Lennon Walls appeared throughout the city. People organized marches, assemblies, sit-ins, and neighborhood networks. Slogans such as “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” resonated far beyond the city itself, echoing a period when social movements were erupting across the world.

For many participants, resistance became a turning point that permanently altered the course of their lives.

Yet as independent researchers, we were left with another challenge. We felt a responsibility to explain what had happened — not only why people took to the streets, but also what they were resisting, what they hoped to protect, and what kind of future they were trying to imagine.

Through countless conversations, field observations, and archival materials, we began to sense how everyday life in the city had become increasingly shaped by mechanisms of control.

We encountered the atmosphere of uncertainty and repression, the anger that drove people into collective action, and at the same time, the hope that another way of living together might still be possible.

And perhaps that is where this zine begins: not with a definitive account of a movement, but with a question：What remains after the streets are cleared, the headlines disappear, and history moves on? What traces are left behind — in places, in communities, and in the lives of those who experienced it?

To understand these movements, we also need to understand the media environments that shape them.

Media never develops in isolation. As cultural theorist Raymond Williams argued, every major transformation in communication emerges from particular social needs and historical conditions.

Take the rise of newspapers in Britain as an example. As industrialization expanded and democratic institutions gradually developed, printed media helped break the monopoly over information once held by churches, schools, and other traditional authorities.

Newspapers connected distant communities, reported on elections, and helped people imagine themselves as part of a larger public. In many ways, they created new social relationships and new ways of participating in society.

Today, we seem to be living through a similar transformation. Terms such as “lockdown,” “AI,” “NFTs,” “ Metaverse,” and “Big data” have become part of everyday language. They pull us toward a world that often feels closer to science fiction than reality. Behind these buzzwords lies something much larger: a new wave of global industrialization that is reshaping how we work, communicate, consume, and even imagine the future.

Infrastructure, algorithms, digital platforms, and data networks are not simply technical systems. They are actively reorganizing our ways of thinking and feeling. Information now travels instantaneously across borders. Political crises unfold in real time on our screens. Social relationships are increasingly mediated through platforms, while emotional exchanges often become more cautious, fragmented, and indirect.

The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre once described moments when philosophy becomes reality — when abstract ideas are suddenly forced into everyday life. Perhaps we are living through such a moment now.

Questions about technology, power, freedom, and collective life are no longer academic concerns. They have become part of our daily experience. But these transformations rarely arrive peacefully. More often, we encounter them through moments of disruption, crisis, and conflict.

Whether in the streets, on digital platforms, or within our own communities, we are constantly negotiating new forms of control and new possibilities for resistance. And it is often through these moments of tension that we begin to understand the historical forces shaping our lives.

This zine is an attempt to document those forces — not as distant observers, but as people living through them.

It asks how media, technology, and urban transformation have reshaped our political imagination, and how ordinary people continue to create spaces for alternative futures within an increasingly uncertain world.

It is within these conditions that INSCRIBED came into being.

Since 2023, we have been compiling a series of monthly short-form records — small attempts to make sense of a rapidly changing world. Across different issues, we have explored topics ranging from cryptography and digital infrastructures to art activism, spatial theory, gender, law, and social movements.

While these subjects may appear disconnected at first glance, they are all shaped by a common question: how do people navigate and remake the worlds they inhabit?

For many scholars, locality is more than a geographic location on a map. It emerges through the relationships between people, culture, memory, and everyday life. Places are not simply where history happens — they are where history is lived, contested, and imagined.

Perhaps this is also what community media can be. Not merely a channel for delivering information, but a space where experiences can be shared, meanings can be negotiated, and new connections can take shape.

A publication, after all, is never just paper and ink. It can also become a meeting point — a small node within a larger network of conversations, friendships, and collective imaginations.

We do not expect this zine to provide definitive answers. Instead, we hope it can serve as a record of questions that remain unresolved, and of voices that might otherwise fade into silence.

If social movements leave traces in the streets, then perhaps publications like this preserve traces in memory.

And so, as this article comes to a close, we invite you to read these pages not simply as documents of the past, but as fragments of an ongoing conversation — — one that stretches across cities, across borders, and across generations.

Because the stories we inherit are never fully finished.

They remain inscribed in places, inscribed in communities.

And, perhaps, inscribed in us.