Bristol + Bath Creative R+D - Amplified Publishing

Zine-making our way to futures of freedom and joy…
An exploration of digital and printed zine-making as a tool for creating communities of care, making activism more accessible, amplifying radical messages and sharing educational resources.

Setting the scene

It was spring 2021 and like so many of us, I was grappling with a lot. I had not long before launched the Shelby x digital zine when a friend of mine sent me an opportunity. It was perfect - a Bristol + Bath Creative R+D Amplified Publishing project were looking for people to research the potential, challenges, and opportunities of publishing.

I started the Shelby zine to support revolutionary change. I wanted to find a way to contribute to political movements in a more accessible and care centred way. Inviting artists and activists to create content spanning illustration, written articles, film and audio, the zine amplifies radical messages from the perspectives of those with lived experience. Due to the pandemic and limitations due to my health, the zine began in digital form. I envisioned Shelby as a place you would go to if you cared about what was going on in the world but weren’t sure how to make sense of things, how to contribute to making change and/or you were looking for a community of people who felt the same way as you. A space where people could connect, learn and create. As a print maker, my heart lay in one day creating printed versions of the zines and I’d been thinking a lot about the relationship between the digital and the physical. This research felt like the perfect timing in terms of where I was at with developing the Shelby zine. A chance to explore what the potential, challenges and opportunities were.

Community = Unity by Sophie Bass

Accessibility for all by Sophie Bass

Artivism by Sophie Bass

Educate to liberate by Sophie Bass

THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS

I started by posing four questions; how can we use digital publishing to:

Build communities of care?
Make activism more accessible?
Share educational resources?
Amplify radical messages?

THE RESEARCH

“That’s the beauty of research.
You go in with one question and come out with 10 more.”

- Caroline Anstey

…………………………

Building communities of care

Underpinning everything we do at Shelby x Studios, I necessarily began this research looking at care. Whilst experiencing chronic pain and enduring a pandemic, in one of our earliest issues of the zine, I asked ‘where is the care?’ It felt missing. Missing in our working lives. Missing in political spaces. Missing even in the supposed “care” systems.

In a capitalist society fatigue is intentional and so, in order to survive, I believe we have to be intentional about care. The care movement has deep radical roots. Strong foundations of collective care were laid by the Black Panther Party, who embedded community care practices through their survival programmes, offering free healthcare, education and food. This was an intentional way to prioritise care in the face of relentless systemic oppression. Understanding this as a vital part of movement building and wanting to push back against the burnout culture that is endemic to campaign work, I was interested in discovering ways to embed care into the work we were doing at Shelby x Studios.

The TAKE CARE zine:

Throughout this fellowship I had the opportunity to work alongside artist and all round phenomenal woman, Lucy J. Turner. Through our conversations, we were interrogating what it meant to “take care” and decided to co-create a zine with this title. It was a love letter to ourselves, a chance to learn about care practices and create something that would share our learning with the Shelby x zine community.

Through this, we explored how we could use art as a tool to imagine to world we want to create. We discussed the importance of visualising freedom and imagining sanctuary in order to build the kind of futures we want to see. If the goal is freedom, we said, then we need to first liberate our minds and our communities. Art can be used to show people that change is possible. By imagining it, we can begin to find ways to try and make it happen. The creative process of making this zine helped us process some of our emotions and thoughts around care. The practice of creating together, as stated in the Shelby x manifesto, was part of revolutionary work. The zine included an article about avoiding activist burnout, a series of beautifully illustrated affirmations, a list of our care practices with an invitation for readers to write their own and famous quotes about radical care such as:

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

- Audre Lorde

Access the TAKE CARE zine here

Recognising that taking care is an ongoing effort, Lucy and I decided we would continue our conversations beyond the zine. We wanted to make more space for artists to discuss issues, share ideas and co-create.

This leads me to the next stage of my research. I invited Lucy J. Turner, Euella Jackson and Roseanna Dias, three creatives that I admire and often work with, to a ‘research retreat’ with the idea that we would spend some time exploring the theme of Pleasure Activism. We rested, cooked, ate, danced, slept, conversed, asked each other questions, hugged, laughed, cried, bathed, read books, listened to music, told stories and rested some more. Here’s some of what they shared with me following our time together:

“Our time away together was a bit like an oasis in the desert. I felt like I didn't know quite how much I needed it until it was happening.”
“We need to do this work of radical care of exploring pleasure activism as individuals AND as a collective - as a reparative practice - and we (all) need to find ways to resource this!! We need to create people-power behind this way of being because we deserve it and the world needs us...”
“Our time away was magical, replenishing, enriching, NEEDED and not long enough - but also a complete ‘pocket utopia’.”
“Soft activism is important, the tiny, enduring revolution that sparks inside of you when you have a group of women caring, connecting and sharing space together is super sacred, and once lit, takes a while to burn out.”

Something really crucial had been unearthed about the importance of connecting and co-creating. As foundational features of the zine, we discussed how collaboration and creativity might come together in different ways. We also spoke a lot about what had brought us joy and how we had found moments of pleasure throughout lockdown. The topic of book clubs was raised and we discussed how this helped people connect around particular themes and opened up space for discussion. As a result of this conversation the concept of a ZINE CLUB was born; sessions inviting people to come together to discuss the zine content and even make their own zines in response. This could be the perfect way to engage people in the zine content in new multimedia, creative and interactive ways, as well as making space for the artists who created the content to share their process.

Since conversation sparks ideas, offers up new perspectives and allows us to connect with each other, a few months after the ‘research retreat’, I invited them to a catch up session. I wanted to discuss the potential of working on a zine together. To get us thinking, we spent some time exploring two issues of the zine that had a particular focus on care - Revolution is Love and TAKE CARE (of course!). This activity raised several questions:

How could we squeeze juices out of the current zines?
What is the relationship between pain and pleasure?
Could we create a podcast together?
How could people create their own pleasure activism retreats?
Could we recycle the zine content by exploring the archive?
What role does nature play in pleasure activism?
Could we have our own tiny desk style event?
(We’d watched these during our time away together)

More on this last point towards the end of this blog…

Making activism more accessible

My experience of chronic pain and burnout led to me no longer being able to participate in political campaigns in the ways that I used to. Building Shelby x Studios was my response to this experience and a way for me to use art and creativity to strengthen social justice movements and community projects. I became very aware that there were lots of people struggling to access campaign spaces for multiple reasons. Some, like myself, were feeling burnt-out and managing chronic health conditions, others were disabled, parents, carers, working multiple jobs and/or unsociable hours, or purely didn’t know where to start or how to navigate activist spaces. I was interested in how art and creativity, specifically zine-making, could make political issues more accessible. It was this broad approach towards accessibility that I wanted to explore.

Training as a graphic designer taught me a lot about the use of design as a form of visual communication. Designing campaign materials such as flyers, banners and badges, I discovered ways of translating complex, often jargon-filled information into concise, punchy and relatable slogans. I found a flow of taking long pieces of unapproachable text and reshaping it into easily digestible graphics that felt more welcoming. People were more likely to engage with the information and were drawn to the creativity. The use of graphics and visuals helped to translate the issues into something people could understand.

The Radical Roots of DIY Zine-Making

This path of my research led me to explore The Radical Roots of DIY Zine-Making and its Impact on the Future of Publishing. I began this exploration by flicking through old political pamphlets from the 70s and 80s. Fundamentally a DIY method of sharing revolutionary information, these publications were used to disseminate radical ideas to the masses and get people on board with campaigns. They were often short in length and printed in limited colours, so that they could be mass produced and inexpensive to print. I learnt a lot about what the essence of zines should be from these pamphlets. Inexpensive, easy to share, educational, community based - accessible.

I went on to research more about the radical roots of DIY zine-making. I wanted to gain more insight into their history with a particular focus on how print technologies made zine-making more accessible. I put together a timeline of pivotal moments in technological print advancements throughout the years and the impact it had on zine-making. I combined this research into a zine about zines and published it both online and in print. This was an experimental learning exercise to explore what the impact of these different versions would have, particularly in engaging different audiences.

Zines and accessible design:

I found through my exploration of zines that design was often employed to help to make the issues they covered more accessible in multiple ways. Passages of text were accompanied by cartoons, illustrations and images, giving visual references which could help give insight to those who are illiterate or struggle to read long sections of text. They used satire to make the difficult issues easier to stomach, finding ways to bring humour and relatability into heavy, often depressing topics. Bold colours underlined words and sentences to draw people’s attention to key information as they perhaps skimmed through. Headings were in bold fonts, subtitles broke things down into manageable chunks and graphics visualised data in unique ways.

Zine-making as a way of making ‘activism’ accessible:

Zines are accessible in that anyone can make one, even with basic tools to hand. All you really need is a piece of paper and something to make a mark with. Their limitless creative potential allows people to express themselves in interesting ways. They can help people explore ideas, develop concepts and share personal experiences. Zines, as a creative tool, make expressing everyday political issues an accessible activity. They have been used to communicate radical political philosophies and in trade union organising, but they can also be much more personal accounts. I discovered the zine genre of perzines - “per” for personal. It made me consider the feminist slogan; the personal is political, meaning our personal experiences are rooted in our political situations. Activism, much like art, carries the weight of expectation associated with the word. Could we use zine-making as a way to explore our material conditions and apply dialectical analysis to the contradictions within capitalist society in a creative and approachable way?

Accessing national and international networks:

Having entered wider consciousness in response to the pandemic, new possibilities around access, such as collaborating with people across the country and internationally, have opened up. Throughout the summer that this research programme took place, I collaborated with Tiana Williams from The Black August Archives to co-create a zine celebrating the revolutionary legacy of George Jackson. Pooling multiple resources into one document with clickable links that took you to different sources, enabled us to create something which explored lots of different elements of George’s legacy; George as a Soledad Brother, George as a family man, George as a supporter of the Palestinian struggle, George and the revolutionary prison movement and George’s literary and theoretical contributions. This zine was printed in the States in order to support fundraising efforts for an in person event commemorating George Jackson. Out of this, another question arose - could zines be used to raise campaign funds?

*A collaborative zine with Tiana Williams, founder of The Black August Archives*

Sharing educational resources

In the digital age we have more access to information than ever before, but the huge quantity of content can be overwhelming and impossible to navigate. Social media, despite offering the ability to easily share information with masses of people online, can often feel superficial and lack tangibility. The Shelby x zines, although also hosted in a digital space, feel less ephemeral than a post. In fact, the idea behind creating the Shelby digital zine platform, was to create a space where people could access content about specific topics, discover new perspectives and revisit particular issues whenever they liked. Within their pages, educational resources designed to inform, enlighten and develop political understanding/theory. If we want to see futures of freedom and joy we have to be educated in political knowledge so that we can take informed action.

Zine-making as an educational tool:

I came across In the ruins of zine pedagogy: a narrative study of teaching with zines, a study considering the educational significance of zines. I thought about my own experiences with using zines in educational settings and realised it had always been operating outside of mainstream education; community workshops, with youth centres or whilst working with young people not in education, employment or training.

Designing educational resources:

This fellowship has found me experimenting with my creative practice in order to find new and innovative ways of sharing information about political issues. Just as I began creating information graphics as a way to strengthen how we communicated key elements of campaigns, I found that visual note-taking created new opportunities for documenting and sharing critical conversations. My graphic recordings have since become integral parts of the zines. Other ways that we have attempted to make information more engaging is through the creation of interactive worksheets, toolkits and guides. Collaborating artists have used a variety of creative methods to produce elements of the zine that people can interact with. There have been audio meditation guides, worksheets for people to interrogate and explore their ideas in relation to articles, a protest sign painting toolkit and much more. Inspired by this, I created a ‘How to Make Your Own Zine Guide’ and included it in the Radical Roots of DIY Zine-making zine. I wanted the zine to become a resource that people could continue to use and hopefully encourage them to create their own zines.

Intergenerational learning:

Looking at the campaigns featured in the political pamphlets from the 70s and 80s reminded me of the importance of archiving lived experiences, of capturing moments, movements and the people that shaped them. Through them, perhaps unintentionally, people had documented important political and social events. A pamphlet published by Hackney Community Defence Association pamphlet (an organisation for the victims of police crime that my parents had supported), reminded me that zines could be a vehicle for intergenerational learning, a way to keep history alive.

Hybrid of digital and physical:

As I discovered through this research, zines have long served a purpose of sharing educational information and as community organising resources. Operating in the digital space, but with a love of print making, I decided to delve into what information sharing looked like with the hybrid of digital and physical. What was the potential for things to exist both on and offline?

This got me thinking about how I could create a resource library where people could access content from the zine in a similar way. I explored the idea of unpacking the zine content and indexing it so that people could navigate and find particular the content. I’d also found from my research that although the flickable zine function was accessible for some, downloadable PDFs might be more accessible for others.

Zine Club and Resource Library:

The concepts of a ‘Zine Club’ and a ‘Resource Library’ got me wondering how this could open up the zine to new audiences who might be interested in accessing content in this way. I also wondered whether inviting people to create their own zines as resources in a space together could be a good way to encourage knowledge sharing. What would be the impact of exploring digital resources from the archive in a physical space? What would this look like if we invited campaigns to share knowledge that artists could then create zines about? How could we also do this in virtual spaces? Once again, more questions were opening up.

AMPLIFYING RADICAL MESSAGES

Zines have a long history rooted in radical politics. Their DIY nature offers a chance for people to tell their own stories, reclaim their cultures and express the rich nuances of their identities, which counter the often violent and misinformed stereotypes presented by mainstream media. They tend to be made by people excluded from conventional forms of publishing and have been particularly popular in feminist, punk, anti-racist, anti-imperialist and queer communities.

They are a vehicle for storytelling that seeks to preserve radical history and resist the erasure of marginalised narratives. Zines exist to make art, spread awareness of issues, engage and connect communities and subcultures and elevate voices that otherwise don't get heard.

Collaboration and TAKE OVER zines:

Collaboration is a vital part of the Shelby x zines and each issue has included pieces from multiple artists responding to different themes. This research has effected the shape that collaboration takes. The work I did looking into care has made think about how I can be more intentional with the collaborative practice of zine-making - working alongside people in a slower more considered way. I have also been committed to finding ways for people to take ownership of the zine without my involvement - a way of passing the mic. If part of what I want to do with the zine is to shift power, I wanted to be open about that and not just expect it to happen on its own. So, rather than setting a brief or a theme I wondered what the impact of handing over the creative reins entirely would be. Could this allow artists space for more freedom of creative expression? Who directs the narrative and what impact does that have on the outcome? How can zines help to challenge the fallacy that identity is monolithic?

In June 2021 we published our first ever TAKE OVER zine: ‘This is NOT a manual’ by Euella Jackson, Stacey Olika and Parys Gardener. As introduced in their own words: ‘This is the journey of three black girls - just existing. That is the radical act.’ It was an important reminder of the radical potential of friendships and reinstated the fact that zines are a creative tool that evidence the feminist theory of the personal as political. They were also calling out the tendency for people to expect them to make work based on single elements of their identities, rather than the breadth of who they are.

The opportunities of digital publishing:

The opportunities that come with digital publishing allow us to push the boundaries of what a ‘zine’ could be and therefore how people access the content that the Shelby x zines offer. Through this process, the zine has continued to shape-shift from static pages to recorded discussions, interactive worksheets, visual-notes, moving images and other creative mediums. Due to its often intangible nature, something which digital publishing can lack, is the ability to ignite our senses. The ability for our zines to contain clickable links, embedded videos, audio and film means we are able to bring the articles, artwork and ideas to life in ways that bring sensory elements into play.

The role of audio:

As a result of this research I have particularly been contemplating the role of audio and it’s ability to quite literally amplify the messages within the zine. We have had audio elements in various issues to date which have been well received by our audience. Our first ever issue has a playlist that runs alongside it. People have said it helped them to spend more time engaging with the content as they had something to listen to whilst flicking through the pages. In issue 2: Revolution is Love, as part of Lucy J. Turner’s illustration which said ‘Click Here for Love’ it plays a guided meditation audio piece. We have also included music by embedding a YouTube link to a song created by musicians in response to a collaborative zine with London Must Act and Create without Borders exploring migration.

As part of the TAKE CARE zine, Lucy and I recorded a series of discussions we had had. We wanted to share them alongside the zine to help bring the content to life and explore how audio and video could share some of the ‘behind the scenes’ of creating the zine.

Partnership with Reel Rebels Radio:

Towards the end of my fellowship, I connected, or in fact reconnected, with Alicia - co-founder of Reel Rebels Radio. We had previously met in connection with Hackney Community Defence Association, though I was a young child, drawing in the corner at the Colin Roach Centre (where Hackney Community Defence Association was based). Our connection felt immediate and as we started speaking about our work and ambitions with it, the many parallels become more obvious. Naturally, collaborative opportunities began to arise. Alicia was running events in the radio station space and was looking for more artists to get involved. Shelby x Studios has worked with a lot of artists. The format of the events was something I had been dreaming of; a gallery space to exhibit artwork, live music, a panel discussion, all recorded so that people could access it in different ways.

I was working on the zine for the Amplified Publishing showcase event and was keen to develop an audio element that would make the zine more accessible in multiple ways. Alicia understood the vision perfectly and created a stand alone piece that helped to create an audio version of the zine for those who are blind or have visual impairments. It was important that this wasn’t just an audio description in a monotone voice, as is often the case, but instead an artwork within its own right, that also made the content accessible to a wider audience. In addition, she created audio elements that made the zine itself more interactive. When you click on images within the zine they play sounds. This became a prototype of the kind of zines I hope to continue making.

Check out the Amplified Publishing Showcase Zine here

(COMING SOON)

INTERVIEWING OTHER ZINE-MAKERS

The final leg of my research saw me interview other zine-makers asking questions that related to my research. You can check these out here.

findings, learning & reflections

This fellowship has led to many findings, much learning and regular reflections. Here are some of the summarising thoughts, questions and ideas that I hope to take forward…

Communities of care:

Slow down and make time to reflect, rejuvenate and rest.

Building a world with community care at its core is a collaborative effort

Collaborative zine-making is my care practice.

QUESTION: How can we resource time, energy and creativity?

IDEAS: TAKE CARE annual retreat. Resources for art activists. Zine Club.

Making activism accessible:

Distribute zines in print and online

Accessibility for one can increase accessibility for all

Zines should be inexpensive, easy to share, educational, community based - accessible.

QUESTION: How could we equip others to make their own zines?

IDEAS: Downloadable zines. Zine workshops and events. Zine Club.

Sharing educational resources:

Use zines as a tool to document, amplify and share campaigns.

Zines provide opportunities for international and intergenerational learning

Explore the hybrid of digital and physical

QUESTION: How can we unpack the zine to create learning resources?

IDEAS: Liberation library with downloadable resources. Zine Club.

Amplifying radical messages:

Take over zines explore the personal as political

Work on national, international and intergenerational campaigns

Use creative technology to amplify radical messages

QUESTION: How can audio feature in the zine?

IDEAS: Partnership with Reel Rebels Radio. Events. Podcast. Take overs through radical zine commissions.

Zine-making helps us imagine futures of freedom and joy.

(Mother of Notting Hill Carnival, writer and community activist)

Zine-making our way to futures of freedom and joy.