jessie lymn

BCLA ‘Archive’ Conference
University of Kent
5-8 July 2010

Zines are small, ephemeral & independent print publications that often fall out of the mainstream collective memory, but capture moments in time of individuals and subcultures. The ephemeral materiality of zines presents a challenge for archiving and collecting these moments and memories in traditional institutions. There are a number of collections of zines across the world, in both public institutions and community spaces, preserving the zines to archival standards. These ephemeral objects are out of their everyday use in archive boxes, stored safely for future reference.

This paper moves on from the physical archiving process and considers the recent spate of zine anthologies published in Australia and the United States. It will examine the role of the  anthology as an archive of both content and form – zine anthologies commonly reproduce entire zines as visual material, not just text. Like the traditional archive they take the zine into another context – the published book instead of the archival box, but the zine continues to have an everyday use.

This paper will also consider the role of the publisher and anthologist in the archival process, and argue that their narratives, presentation and distribution preserve ideologies of zine culture.

The Archive and Everyday Life Conference
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON
May 7 & 8 2010

In Archive Fever Derrida argues that we archive our past to enable our present and future. Institutional archives are spaces regulated by professional guidelines, national and cultural identities and social process, entrusted to preserve the memory of people and nations. These archives are containers of materiality, paying attention to order and preservation. However the material object is only one dimension or representation of culture. Following from Cvetkovich’s archive of feelings, with zines as the research site, this paper considers non-material dimensionality as an absent and uncontainable element of the institutional archive.

Zines are ephemeral, independent, DIY print publications, made in the fringes of dominant practice; in bedrooms and living rooms, on trains and buses, in public parks, secretly in school or work time. They are often printed in the borderlands, with photocopies stolen from workplaces and fellow conspirators in copy shops (de Certeau’s perruque), or printed on cheap collective printing presses, or made patiently by hand. They are given to friends, distributed through established zine networks, traded for other zines (or cupcakes, or music), and sold through zine distros and at zine fairs. Zine content is not prescribed; they might contain personal thoughts, abstract visions, radical opinion, recipes, art, music or other physical objects. Zines can be communities and subcultures, and part of everyday practice.

There are active discourses about zine collection and management in contemporary library and archive practice (Bartel). Within institutions zines present challenges in acquisition, preservation, content and classification; the zines in these institutions are the material artifacts of broader practices.

This paper will consider other archival spaces of zines - bedrooms, trains, and workplaces and more. Spaces of production, consumption and collection that are zines, outside the libraries and archives. Spaces where everyday practices take place, practices that are ephemeral moments, where the material object is the ‘trace left behind’ (de Certeau, 1988, 97), which in the Archive becomes the thing with which we know the past,.

Considering these other, everyday sites and processes as archival spaces we see the moments in history and memory-making of the non-material dimensions of zines (the currencies, the trades, the gossip and innuendo, the production processes, the contexts). I argue that an awareness of these ‘other’ dimensions reinforces the subjective, material nature of the institutional archive, and acknowledges (yet doesn’t attempt to capture) the other spaces of everyday life.

Bartel, J (2004) From A to Zine: Building a winning zine collection in your library
de Certeau, M (1988) The practice of everyday life
Cvetkovich, A (2003) An archive of feelings
Derrida, J (1998) Archive fever: A Freudian expression

I’m involved in organising the inaugural Open Fields ‘coming together of minds’ in Sydney this April.

Open Fields is billed as ‘a two day forum of creative research, experimentation and practice held from April 28-30 at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Serial Space Gallery, Chippendale’, and is pretty damn exciting. People are coming from all over, from Redfern to Melbourne, and we’re screening work from Berlin and the US.

I’m co-ordinating the live print publication as part of my research project. I’m interested in how and what we as a temporally and spatially collected group of people choose to lay over the top of words from the three days.