Spilll is a queer culinary zine series that’s crafted with a decentralised design model

The people behind Spilll, a queer East and Southeast Asian collective, were once four strangers that found solace and solidarity in home-cooked comforts. This shared interest in food, as well as politics, identity and culture, steered Panita, Hyeda, Mika, Nandal, the publishing groups four co-founders, to team up on an ongoing series of zines on food and personal experiences that are filled with “discussion on feminism and queerness from Japan, South Korea, and Thailand”, shares Nandal.

Each of the collective’s zines views “the dining table as a seedbed for these political discussions”, Panita tells us. It’s third issue: Spilll volume 3, untangles conversations on gender, fetishism and desire, topped off with the collective’s favourite instant noodle recipes for readers to snack on. Every issue is filled with nuggets of feminist-queer history, recipes to get stuck into and short snippets of conversations that reframe common narratives around women’s “cooking and chitchat as ‘domestic’ and insignificant”, says Mika. The reading experience is like pulling up a seat at the table and eavesdropping on dinner time topics that seamlessly blend our fascination with something so close and familiar to our daily life; what we eat, with broader ideas that reimagine cooking as a way we experience the world around us.

When putting all these things into print, Spilll uses a decentralised design model. All members illustrate, write for and construct the look of a new issue using digital co-designing tools that bring them together across time zones. There’s a lot of mess before it gets to this stage though, often the start of an idea for their Risograph-printed pages comes out of one of the groups joint workshops, where an exploration of print materials involves “using our hands to explore materialities like sauces, noodles, packages by scanning, altering, and printing again”, shares Mika. “This quite chaotic process, releases the act of design so that it can become a participatory, collaborative dialogue,” Hyeda ends.