Zines are one of my favorite print media products of all times. They are media artifacts that provide a platform for self-expression and communication, allowing individuals and communities to share their voices, stories, and ideas without the constraints of mainstream media and industrial production processes. Zines, or “fanzines” as they are also known, are basically self-published non-professional magazines created by enthusiasts, typically focusing on niche interests like music, literature, comics, or fandoms. Techniques for making fanzines are diverse and based on DIY processes and aesthetics, often involving collage, hand-drawn illustrations, typewritten text, and of course, photocopying. Likewise, the materials used in the making are varied, including a range of media from paper cutouts and found images to printed texts and photographs. Since their origin and popularization in the first half of the 20th century, zines have fostered collaborative processes, encouraging contributors to work together, share skills, and create content that reflects their collective identity, interests and local contexts.
From youth subcultures (e.g. punk, metal, indie, secondhand fashion) to literary fandoms (e.g. sci-fi, weird, fantasy, comics), zines have enabled diverse perspectives to flourish, promoted cultural exchange, and strengthened community bonds. Although they originated in the context of the 1930s U.S. amateur press publishing movement (e.g. Amateur Press Associations), zine production practices quickly spread through the world and across languages. Today, in the midst of the digital age, they remain influential in countercultural movements, alternative politics, popular education, and beyond. DIY production is still booming with the incorporation of new tools and technologies (e.g. risograph, mobile phones, laptops), and fanzines have become valued media texts that are being archived and exhibited by cultural and memory institutions and independent collectors. In Latin America, for instance, there are several growing zine archives such as the ones of Zinoteca from the UNAM Chopo Museum in Mexico, the archive of Fanzinoteca Espigadoras, and the Cocodrilos fanzine collection of Bogota’s Digital Library.
On Saturday June 8, during the Tierra Común encounter we hosted at Universidad Javeriana, in Bogotá, we co-produced a new fanzine addressing the complicated relationship among data, bodies and territories. The event brought together a diverse group of researchers, activists, and learners from academic institutions, NGOs, and community organizations working on issues related to datafication and digital decolonization. We met at modular auditorium, with movable chairs, tables, and boards we could re-organize according to different interactive and dialogic activities we developed. Attendees delivered short presentations of their research and activist work, joined mini round tables/conversations, and participated in various thematic workshops (e.g. community wi-fi networks, zine making, data literacies, indigenous data governance).
As facilitators of the fanzine workshop, Sergio Rodriguez Gomez and I, structured the fanzine co-production process in two sessions that spanned for almost two hours each, one in the morning, the other in the afternoon. During the first session, participants collaborated in the making of new content. Working in groups of five and using a range of materials and tools we have prepared (prompts, found images, old magazines and newspapers, typewriters, paper, scissors, glue, Mexican lottery boards), participants generated the fanzine pages from scratch. In the spirit of DIY, we let creative freedom to flow organically, encouraging the groups to choose the techniques, materials, aesthetics, and languages (most of the content is in Spanish, but there are a couple of pages in Wayunaiki) of their choice, leveraging all the media we had available at the room, and engaging in vibrant dialogical creative exchanges.
During the second session, in parallel to other workshops, a small group of ad-hoc editors, collected, reviewed, and assembled all the pages that were co-created into one single volume of 28 pages. The zine is very rich and plural in media formats and genres, including collage, poetry, manifestos, network visualizations, testimonies, and hand-drawings. The ad-hoc editors also created a new front and back page, and finished the master copy. At the end of the afternoon, and after wrapping up the event, Sergio and I, took the master copy to nearby “papelería” (a kind of locally owned arts and crafts store and small business popular in Colombia), photocopied three proof copies of the fanzine and using the, saddle stitching method, we folded the pages in half and stapled along the crease. Although the “papelería” where we photocopied the zine proofs didn’t have a long-reach stapler, we were able to use small stapler made it to work after several attempts. We shared the three zine proofs at a dinner we had at night, and received positive feedback. The following week we photocopied 30 zine copies and distributed at the round table and panel that Tierra Comun had at the 2024 LASA conference.
A pdf version of the fanzine is available here. The folks from CCB from Mexico City that participated in the workshop shared an online post in Spanish about the fanzine. We plan to photocopy more copies of the zine and circulated among local independent bookstores, community organizations, and friends.
