A ‘Zine’ is a homemade magazine, often on a niche topic or art presentation (photographers often make them). Hand assembled, small volume, bespoke works usually published by a single person or small group.

Zines are the antithesis of AI generated, online access, subscription required, mass marketed slop.

An excerpt from the article by Brennan Kenneth Brown: How has a lack of ownership changed art?

But I still think about the person at the photocopier. The off-white fluorescent hum of the copy shop at 9pm, a greenish cast thrown over everything. The smell of hot toner, living in the atavistic corner of the brain alongside other childhood scents: rubber cement, mimeograph ink, fresh gasoline, the interior of a school locker. The rhythmic thunk-slide-thunk of the platen moving across the glass. Each page comes out warm, curled at the corners, carrying a residual heat like freshly-baked cookies.

The zine-maker feeds in the main page—off-centre with a smudge in the upper third that she’s decided to live with—and the machine begins patient work. She collates the pages by hand, making little stacks on the counter, moving her lips as she counts. Paper cheap and thin. Chalky on the surface, with a resistance when you drag a fingernail across it, like running your thumb over a dried watercolour wash. She folds the pages in half and creases the spine with the heel of her hand, pressing firmly, the bone of the wrist white with the pressure. Then the stapler—one of those long-armed saddle-stitch staplers, orange and industrial, the kind you rent—driven down through the fold with a two-handed slam biting through all twenty pages at once and the staple clicks home sounding like a small, definitive argument. She peels back the inside cover to fold the staple legs flat.

She does this 40 times. Or 70. Or however many can be afforded.

The zine is titled “Permission Slip // You Can Do This Too!“, with her name in capital letters above a hand-drawn heart. On one level, it’s a how-to guide—how to make a zine, step-by-step annotated diagrams of the saddle stitch and a glossary of terms like bleed and master copy and risograph. On another level, it is more urgent. Between the instructions and diagrams, she has written about her body and love and liberation. About the exhaustion of moving through the world in a body keeps being asked to explain itself. About community. About the first time she saw herself reflected in something handmade and distributed outside of any institution that required her to justify her own existence. The instructions and the liberation are inseparable—because the point of the how-to is not craft. It is permission. She writes you can make the thing that shows you to yourself. Nobody can stop you. Here is how.

The cover is a linocut, ink uneven in the valleys of the block, the image blurry at the edges. A photocopied collage of faces with halftone dots blown up to the size of sand, cut-out letters from different magazines making a ransom note of the title. Elmer’s glue still raised where it wasn’t pressed down all the way, creating a topography you can feel with your fingertips in the dark. Text in a typeface she downloaded for free, printed too dark, too beautiful for the grubby context.

She carefully puts the copies in a canvas tote with a screen-printed logo from some other show, another artist’s work carrying this artist’s work. She gets on the bus then walks six blocks through a cold night, breath a brief white ghost. She lays the zines out on a table at a festival in a community space. Her table has a paper tablecloth this time. There are other tables around, other people doing the same thing, smelling of cheap coffee and sawdust and the staleness of a church hall and arts centre pressed into unusual service. People are moving between the tables. Some of them pick up the zine and leaf through it and put it down. Some of them pick it up and hold it, weighing it. Some of them hand over a five-dollar bill or drop a toonie into a jar without being asked.

Some of them trade—here, I made this, do you want to trade?—and the zine leaves the table, leaves the room, leaves the city eventually, carried in someone’s bag next to their keys and their transit card and their phone, warm and rectangular and containing ten hundred thousand pieces of content that will evaporate and vanish.

The zine doesn’t vanish. It will accumulate a coffee ring. It will get slightly bent in someone’s back pocket. It will live on a shelf, then in a box, then maybe in the hands of a stranger at a thrift store who opens it and reads the first page and says huh, and buys it for a dollar.

Then, a teenager finds it tucked inside a secondhand copy of Stone Butch Blues and reads it cover to cover on a bus home. It makes him pick up a pencil and he will write zine on a piece of paper and feel the word in his mouth for the first time. He finds a stapler. He writes down a truth about himself that he never told anyone before. He decides in a small and world-altering way that it is worth reproducing. Someone else might need it, he thinks. The how-to instructions will teach him the mechanics; the Queer liberation teaches him the why. And he will stand at a photocopier for the first time.

The toner is bonded to the fibre of the page. The staple is a small bright seam in the spine.

The subscription model cannot touch any of this. That’s a claim about what art is for—and what we are for. Making and holding and pressing things into each other’s hands.