zine-making and the future
summer fun
I went into 2023 knowing it would be a busy, complicated year. I was going to turn 30, get married, and continue to manage the feelings of post-pandemic reemergence—a slow, incremental process for me and everyone I know.
These factors meant it would also be a tough writing year. Logistics and busy-ness throw off my patterns and routines, which makes writing much harder. I’ve been trying to use this unavoidable disruption of normal life as an opportunity to let in-progress ideas simmer before I write about them. (I’ve got several things on the stove right now, so bear with me!)
But today I have something fun to talk about: zine-making!
This spring, I had an idea to assemble an art/writing zine with some friends. I wanted to take my friends’ work seriously, with an aim to turn that seriousness into a kind of practice. The roots of this went further back than the pandemic—in 2019, I was preoccupied with the thought that if things continued to go the way they were going, almost nothing produced by mainstream media conglomerates would be worth viewing. What was available for consumption did not appear to be helping us with our isolation problem. It seemed clear that it was time to look elsewhere for art and connection. Where better to start than with the people around us? I thought it would be interesting to see what ideas emerged from asking artists in my sphere to respond to a broad, relevant theme.
The other important component of the zine was tangibility. The zines would be printed and assembled in a DIY way that could be done at home. Then, I hoped to bring the contributors together in person. The title of the zine reflects this tangibility: art_irl.
So, I asked several friends and friends-of-friends to contribute something about “the future” to art_irl. On 8/19, most of the eleven contributors met at a cafe, and I gave out printed copies of the zine. During the meet-up, several friends reflected on the value of constraints in making stuff. They were grateful for the deadline, the theme, the simple request: write something. I was moved by this—that maybe we just wish someone would ask.
If you’d like to read the zine, you can download a PDF here. Below, I wrote up some ideas and connection points I noticed when reading.
Big themes: potential, identities, hopes.
That’s not to discount fear, which is present in the zine as well. But I find any fear of the future to be subdued in this collection. More evident is a cautious, but solid, sense of material reality. We are here, despite everything. The pieces often zero in on personal relationships and situations, but they have larger implications. Together, the pieces seem to ask: now what?
Flipping through, a range of years stand out: 2000, 2001, 2004, 2020, 2075. Essential historical reference points are represented: the COVID-19 pandemic, 9/11. Plus emotional reference points, like the end of high school, a break-up, and the vestiges of an old friendship. The characters in the written pieces are misunderstood and misidentified. Things are “ending,” but these narrators tend to walk away from and gaze past endings. They exit places, look out windows, and emerge from mental blocks—even if that emergence is just a glimpse of what could be, or a return to an identity that feels true.
The visual pieces abstract the relationship between time and “the future” as a larger concept. There is progression (a drop of liquid falls into a cup), but it’s not straightforward (empty space suddenly grows flowers). I have the urge to count, to chart a linearity that doesn’t really appear. It’s all question marks and blank lines. An empty chair. These are placeholders; there is nothing sufficient to fill the spaces. Yet.
The in-between pages hold screenshots of things I saw online, photographs I took in my neighborhood, and passages from books. Images of news and other headlines are meant to place the zine in time. I wanted to separate these images from their context; defamiliarized, their strangeness is obvious.
The last page of the zine includes instructions for printing and saddle-stitching the zine. I’ve also included the sources of the book passages, where I got the letters that make up titles and the cover (old magazines you can find on the Internet Archive), and the program I used to lay out the zine.
The zine’s existence creates a kind of future in my mind. I always hoped this might exist: a time where I could see my work alongside the work of others, where we could meet and talk, and see how our ideas relate, conflict, or bounce off each other. The zine makes that future real.
Art_irl will hopefully be back in the winter or spring. :)