Shelby x OOMK Zine
ABOUT OOMK ZINE
OOMK (one of my kind) is an art publishing collective run by Sofia Niazi, Rose Nordin and Heiba Lamara.
Together, they produce OOMK zine, a biannual publication focused on women, art and activism as well as various art publications prompted by collective research. OOMK curate and programme publishing events and discussions with a particular interest in arts for social practice, alternative education and centring marginalised voices through print and small press. Founded in 2016, they also run Rabbits Road Press - a community printing press in Newham, East London.
We interviewed Sofia Niazi, co-founder of OOMK Zine, as part of our research for the Bristol + Bath Creative R+D programme to find out more about their work and how it relates to the topic of Amplified Publishing.
Shelby X: Could you start by introducing OOMK Zine? What's the backstory, who is involved and why did you start it?
Sofia: Our zine is OOMK which stands for One of My Kind, it’s a zine about women, art, activism and faith. I started it with Rose Mordin and Sofia Niazi in 2012 and then Heiba Lamara joined in 2013. We’ve had 6 issues to date and each one has had a different creative theme. We started the zine when Tumblr was really big so we were really keen to create a space where people would be making new content instead of just re-blogging. We are all muslim so we also wanted to foreground content by religious people and muslim people.
Shelby X: Could you speak about the role of zine making in amplifying the topics of women, art, activism and faith?
Sofia: We were all making zines before we started OOMK and we think that zines are a good way of amplifying messages because they are quite cheap and easy to produce. Any activism we do is in the backdrop of the digital culture that we are a part of and so working on something that has been laboured over is in resistance to that culture. That’s an underlying thing in everything we are doing. It’s also a physical object to gather around, to sell and trade and to share at zine fairs and other points of dissemination, which encourage community building. Part of the zine is about having the ingredients of a pleasant life, as well as communicating a message. It’s about the process of making, the joy of gathering and that’s what’s nice about it. It kind of feeds itself. It almost has its own eco-system.
Shelby X: So, you’re based at Somerset House and I wondered whether impacts your practice and if so how?
Sofia: Yeah, that’s a good question. We were based at Somerset House, mainly me and Rose, but we’re mainly based at Rabbits Road Press in terms of where we work from, where we meet and where we print. Rose works as a graphic designer. It hasn’t impacted our practice massively, but it was nice to have a studio space in central London that isn’t as far for each of us to get to. I know there are markers when you’re working in the arts world that kind of show that you are progressing but underground, you have to think about what is actually pushing your work forward and in what ways. I always think about spaces in terms of ‘how does this space help us to make more or to have different conversations, or to what extent does it make it feel like we’re doing is more stable.’ So in that respect I really think that Rabbits Road Press has given us that sense of security and freedom because it feels a lot more independent as a space than being in anybody else studio. We’re based in Old Manor Park Library, we’ve got a large space at the front of it where we’ve got all of our Risograph printing machines and it’s a place where we’ve run summer schools from and it’s very little paperwork if we want to do any sort of activities there, like hosting workshops and open access sessions.
Shelby X: What are your thoughts on the topic of digital and physical?
Sofia: I guess the nice thing about the physical and about Rabbits Road Press is that it is kind of like a classroom space so, so it’s a space where you can figure things out in your work. So instead of just publishing, there’s a lots of collage making, art making, lots of drawing materials, people are not expected come in with a final thing or print every time they come – that’s when we have the open access running. Print is really nice for building that nourishing, IRL, community world where there is extra excitement and stuff going on. And then digital is a really democratic way of disseminating what you’ve done for people who can’t be involved in the IRL side of things. Digital is a really nice way of growing a network and solidarity base. Rabbits RR is a business so it’s important for us to have a public facing online presence where people can find out about us. I don’t see any tension between digital and print but I think digital alone is draining more than nourishing. We reduced our online presence quite a lot over the past few years because it felt like we were becoming a digital media outlet and that’s not what we wanted to do. We wanted to be an artist collective, to be about encouraging ourselves and each other to spend time in development and test things out and almost be in conversation with ourselves without always making shit.
Shelby X: What are some of the ways you manage to make your practice sustainable, both financially and in terms of wellbeing?
Sofia: Our practice is really flexible and none of us rely on OOMK as their sole income and we’ve all got other jobs. The zine didn’t fit into the category of employment, of job, of profit making so for the most part we try and measuring its success in terms of how much money it can make or how far a reach it could have wasn’t really the point. In terms of how we’ve kept the collective going, mainly it’s been down to approaching it like ‘instead of how can we keep the art going, it’s how can art help to keep our friendships going?’ that’s helped to keep us all in conversation with eachother and it’s part of culture as a group. So the business side of things is very flexible. We just do work as and when we get it and match it to people’s availability. It’s being pragmatic about what you have that is a service or a product and what you have that isn’t and not putting pressure on the things that aren’t to generate money and being a bit more clever about the things that are to generate some income. So for example, we are a printers so people don’t work with us in a capacity as artists, sometimes they just need stuff printed. We’re also teachers so we can facilitate learning activities and workshops. That’s actually really freeing, removing yourself as an artist and just being a technician or a facilitator sometimes. We also get commissioned a lot as artists and as a collective and then we can also print work and produce publications which means we’ve got a bit of leeway with generating income. In general, I think recognising from the get go that being part of an art collective is not a money making venture and also that people have different skills and careers that we can each support without having to be a part of it. Flexibility is key. Because we are muslim we have a kind of unspoken code of conduct, an ethic that means we try to be fair, build in care, be understanding and not put too much pressure on eachother. If we have difficulties we try to figure things out together and that religious side of things has really helped us. It’s a bit like a manifesto. It’s a set of rules that means everyone is protected.
We’re also very risk adverse so we don’t have huge costs or pay huge rent or anything like that so we don’t have to stress about covering big costs. We work very simply and have no ambition to scale everything up. We don’t want to put anyone under pressure, we want people to be able to take opportunities when and where they come up so we have a very flexible model. We have one or two admin days a month and other than that everything is based on freelance work that we get. There’s a set fee and everyone gets paid for what they do. There are no running salaries and we’re not trying to create jobs but we’re able to flexible when there is some work. We also work in universities. We can see that there’s a need for people to have access to arts education and resources without having to pay huge fees. We’re also trying to find ways of doing things so that we still have secure employment so it’s not like we’re able to do Rabbits Road full time. Sooner or later someone needs to find out a way of making arts schools outside of university because it’s coming to a place where in a few years it’s going to be completely unethical with students having to pay interest on loans etc.
Shelby X: What are some of the projects you’ve been involved in through Rabbits Road Press?
Sofia: It’s where we print our own zines. When we started the press we wanted it to benefit us as much as other people. We thought about what other people like us, not in terms of identity or anything, but what would we ourselves find useful. Because if we genuinely want this resource, I’m sure there are other people out there that also want it and if they don’t, at least we can use it. As opposed to coming up with something that would fit some kind of funding bid or anything, it’s been really organic and grassroots. We’ve always been quite close to the ground, thinking about what people want and need.
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