We Did A Zine And Left It To Rot
"Is it poisonous? ??"
Awhile back, my friend, Ethan, approached me to create a zine for his creation, Fassbender and Melloncollie, a space where he explores the fine line between what’s “beautiful” and “ugly” through the idea of hand-dyed garments.
Ice, dye & time are the main elements to blur the lines between 'beauty' & what is deemed 'ugly' by society. — Fassbender and Melloncollie
I was freelancing at that time and obviously wouldn’t pass up a fun project like this. The entire discussion yada yada process was really smooth. Just a couple of meetings here and there with both him and Chris (the photographer of the photos we were going to incorporate into the zine), and then we plunged right into it.
Cooking up the visuals, I wrote the words that would accompany the images and had Ethan to handwrite them together with the “About” for FBMC, which I then collaged together. The idea was to have it like a dusty journal of sorts.
After very minimal to and fros (cheers to Trust with a capital T), we got down to printing it. Regular inkjet printing in BnW, the cheapest option… And also not to mention, embodying the spirit of what Zines were originally created for: cheap ways to speak up!!
Zines are characteristically cheap to make, often photocopied, and have a distinctly “DIY” look. Often, they represent the voices of people on the fringes, and their content is hyper local. — Bookriot
Process
Basically, we had to assemble all the sheets in sequence (I think either the printing shop had the papers trimmed for us or Ethan did), fasten them together with a loose fabric scrap, dip the flowers in water and apply the colours from it at random, let it “dry”, insert more dried flowers and let the colours from it leak out even more onto the zine. Some were burnt with incense sticks at random as well. Lastly, we packaged it all into a poly bag, and sealed it with tape.
It took more than 5 hours. Looking very much like a controlled mess, every zine was different:
Results
End of Story. Or as we thought.
…
A few weeks later,
Basically, the flowers turned mouldy and everything looked “disgusting”. It took our initial intention of “ugly” to the next level, though. Anyway, there was slight panic, a little bit of laughing, also worried that it might be “poisonous” (LOL). Case in point:
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Eventually we both just accepted it. Honestly, seeing the way it evolved within a poly bag was NGL kind of fascinating. To me at least. The only problem was, who would want it now? But anyhow, it left my mind for almost a year (WTF time flies), and today, I finally decided to see for myself what my copy looked like after one year (and four months) of letting it ROT.
Opening it was “experiential”. And honestly, I don’t hate it. It was not as bad as I expected, and kind of what we intended in the first place: an explosion of stuff, consuming it as one big lovely mess.
Conclusion
My biggest takeaway from this zine-mishap is, if a zine is “unreadable”, does the zine become an object instead? Is a rotting zine still a zine? What defines a zine anyway? Zines were intended to be cheap alternatives to share/convey a message, creation, expression with the public via print. In our case, even if this zine had become slightly inconvenient to consume, the message of its content still translates through what it became, one way or another… So I guess to answer my own question: Yes, our zine remains a zine.
There you have it. It was not click bait, we really did make a zine and left it to rot for a little over a year. If anyone wants one, we still have some. You can have it for free, just reach out!
Last thoughts: IMO there are no rules when it comes to zine making, we can do whatever we please. So, keep your message going, and continue to pass on the spirit of reckless expression.
Going to wash my hands now. Bye!