Via the medium of zines, Roel and Glasgow Zine Library encourage creators and readers in Scotland and Indonesia to retell their local mythologies and reconnect with traditions of environmental stewardship to reframe today’s ecological issues.
Ecology has become a more pressing issue today than any moment in history. By reconnecting nature with local mythology it inspired over generations, we hope to foster a stronger relationship between people and their traditions of environmental stewardship. Glasgow Zine Library (GZL) and I have collaborated to create three main activities: an artist residency, a series of zine workshops, and a zine publication, all centred around retelling local mythologies in Scotland and Indonesia.
This project also marks the first connection GZL has established with the Indonesian zine culture.
During this collaboration, I visited Scotland to run several zine-making workshops at Glasgow and Edinburgh Zine Libraries, hold a talk about the storied zine culture of Indonesia, and start the production of what would eventually become the Once Upon a Time zine.
Zines as a medium of empowerment
Zines—self-published magazines—can be a powerful medium to connect and create a sense of community between creators and readers, inspiring interest as well as action. In the zine-making workshops, participants were introduced to zines as a concept and encouraged to produce their own, based on the myths and legends they were familiar with.
With art and writing in the simple, accessible medium of zines, participants were invited to retell stories from their childhood, draw upon anecdotes, or create entirely new ones.
Zine-making is, among many things, about taking a narrative into your own hands. It’s about sharing stories, knowledge, and the commonality of beliefs that form and underpin our communities.
It is also about the quieter stories, the narratives under the surface, those of the marginalised that we don’t normally get to hear.
