Co-zines (2020—)

By

Sally Lemsford

Co-producing ‘zines with friends and family, during the Covid-19 lockdown…

Starting during the zine month of July 2020, and still continuing, I invited friends and family to co-produce ‘zines, sharing and combining ideas, images, words by post, email or video. I suggested they could do as little or as much as they liked. Zines are small leaflets/magazines printed cheaply in small quantities to share with a few people. Each collaborative one starts with a conversation about what interests us and develops from there. It can be descriptive or social comment. It can be images with or without words. So far we have created stories, a poem + score + subsequent piano recording, an origami house and some others. The outcomes are various; some people, though initially anxious, have continued to be creative, others have shared the result proudly. One zine took an hour in total because she has dementia, another is ongoing call and response that may run for a long time before the photos and collages are collated into a zine.

The project is continuing to evolve in unexpected ways. Thinking about how to connect differently with people has opened up a world of possibilities…

“Love the Zine, what do you think of it? Lovely to see it so big and bright on screen. I showed it to my friends.”

— Co-zine collaborator

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Sally Lemsford

Conversations and situations have always been at the centre of my practice – co-produced installations and participatory performance in public places with passersby and self-generated festivals. Critical engagement in the social context. Now socially distance, my work is manifesting as social comment zines and online events. Digital platforms and formats, connections and dis-connections, are structural and procedural – live streaming, digital recording/editing of sound and film, online publishing using social media. There are a myriad of possibilities for connecting locally and globally. This is validation with integrity rather than following the status quo, celebrating the unexpecteds of co-production and guerrilla actions.

sallylemsford.co.uk