Earlier on this year, one of the team-members of my neuro-inclusive day party, Out Of Body Pop, described our event as ‘borrowing from clubs, festivals and arts workshops.’

We operate outside of peak summer times because people have already got nice day events to go to in the summer, or at least they can go and hang out in the park and meet people there. I have had plenty of annoying experiences at London day festivals, but I still think it’s a lot easier to find a good mental health friendly party in the summer.

My favourite London festival is Rally, I’ve been to every edition and I really appreciate the effort they go to of keeping things moving forwards, programming future-facing music and involving the visual arts in interesting ways. This year I watched POiSON GiRL FRiEND (so beautiful) and Bass Victim (so fun being in the least intimidating mosh pit ever, full of Gen z Goldsmiths students), but my favourite experience at Rally was focussed not on a music artist, but rather a local publishing house; Em-Dash.

The Em-Dash team, artist Saundra Liemantoro and designer Aarushi Matiyani, had their own stall at a zine fair within Rally festival 2025 (said fair was organised by NTS DJ Anu, an amazing comic artist in her own right who headlined the first OOBP party). I turned up bright and early, bought a pair of their ‘memepage’ publications and a copy of their ‘sexy librarian newsletter’, and headed off to read my findings in the sun, soundtracked perfectly by the wonderful ambient artist Malibu.

The ‘meme pages’ were packed into tracing paper, and comprised of in-depth interviews with local artists and academics about their relationship to meme culture (printed onto RISO zines), gathered alongside a set of these artists’ chosen memes (printed onto glossy stickers).

The most interesting thing about these ‘memepages’ for me was the experience of getting to know a local artist via conversation and items. Phenomenologically, it felt a lot closer to browsing someone’s tumblr page than reading a profile about them in a magazine. This was particularly powerful given that the most recent ‘meme page’ (published weeks before the festival) platformed two trans creatives, the format allowed for a wonderful balance of respect and playfulness.

There was some of the formality that you would expect from a sharp, physical publication; you got a clear intro to each guest, quickly situating them as a creative, and questions were insightful and conceptual. But this formality never felt clinical or tokenistic; the way that guests’ queerness was shared didn’t feel like they were being tied down to a generic, hyper-accessible identity narrative (as is so often the case).

The guests’ shared memes were generally focussed around the trans experience; as a reader you got a look into trans phenomenology, with Em-Dash’s curation highlighting the character and tone of these lived experiences, without talking down to the reader and setting down the groundwork of anyone’s transition story. Because the subject here is not the guests and their life story, it is the meme culture that they engage with, something that will feel immediately familiar to meme-readers, even though we find it hard to put into words. For Internet-based creatives, memes are a really pure form of expression, they are spontaneous and unpretentious, they can naturally soak up so much character and richness whilst also being really fun and accessible to read. I also really appreciated the Instagram tips from the guests – I’ve become particularly addicted to @libraries, a fantastic pop culture chronicle.

I thoroughly recommend following my own Em-Dash reading experience, starting with their meme pages, before moving onto their ‘Sexy Librarian Newsletter.’ Do not read the product description or google the subject of ‘Sexy Librarian Newsletter’, just buy it and read it from start to back.

The reading journey is so good, I found myself saying ‘wow’ upon completion, triggered by a certain surprise in the narrative. It embodied everything that I want in out of body pop; experimentation, playfulness, accessibility, taking people on a journey for a real reason, exploring how beautiful and strange modern life can be in all its nuances. Enjoy.