Interview with Artizine

Ioana Simion founded Artizine in 2019, whilst completing her masters degree. Artizine encourages the expression of creativity through analogue production of zines, and places emphasis on a sense of collaboration and community. I made my first ever zine as part of my dissertation and I just loved everything about it. During my MA I explored workshop facilitation and started to focus on designing and delivering zine-making workshops for individuals in need of a creative outlet.  The aim was to invite people in a safe and inclusive space where everyone is empowered to create, come together and open up to each other.

I say ‘we’ a lot when speaking about Artizine, but it’s just me behind it. I collaborate with so many creatives in my workshops that I feel like it’s a ‘we’ because ultimately, Artizine is a community.

Hosting workshops has been Artizine’s primary way of spreading their craft, and they organised around 50 workshops from 2019 until present. My approach towards zine-making is to try and pair it with other art practices and think about it in a more holistic way. I believe you can use zine-making in so many ways - as a tool to tackle creative blocks and anxieties or document your feelings towards something you’re passionate about. What’s really important about our workshops is our mission to perpetuate a sense of belonging and community in what we do; I would love to think Artizine is about creating strong connections between people more than anything else.

When Covid hit I started to facilitate our workshops online. I wanted to do more than just zine making, so I collaborated with friends: graphic designers, multidisciplinary artists and illustrators to design accessible workshops to lift everyone’s mood in isolation and encourage them to engage in ‘making’.

The impact of Covid for Artizine has meant that workshops had to be taken online, which although less intimate, have allowed the collaboration with people who wouldn’t have been able to join in person. Through digital collaborations Artizine has grown as a community, and people have been able to join workshops from all areas of the world. Being online challenged me to find new ways of thinking about the ‘digital space’ - I was interested in exploring ideas of radical communal care through craft and making. During quarantine, I was lucky to facilitate workshops for students, community centres and young individuals who were in need of social interaction - I feel like zine-making is so accessible, that everybody embraced the idea of hanging out online and making zines.

The use of recycled materials for zines means that they are inherently sustainable and environmentally friendly, tying in with their accessible nature. This is a huge aspect of Artizine and I try to speak about it as much as I can. This is how Artizine started - by collecting donations of art supplies and paper waste from the studios I was studying in. At the time, I wanted to start Artizine and facilitate all these free workshops for my community, but I didn’t have the art supplies to do so. Rather than ask corporations and printers, I wanted to keep it more organic, so I asked the owners of these art supplies if they wanted to donate their scraps, test prints or whatever was in the print room to my project, where they would be repurposed into zines. 

I know that on a big scale this doesn’t seem to make a massive impact, but it’s the mindset behind repurposing that can push change. When you’re repurposing materials you're becoming a hacker - deconstructing and re-interpreting. It’s craftivism, it’s thinking of new sustainable ways of making.

Zines are not limited to creative expression, Ioana is a visual learner and has used zines to revise while studying at University, by adapting her notes, for both her undergrad in Magazine Journalism, and her masters in Visual Communications. What I would do is collect all my notes on A3 paper and I’d make a zine by splitting the page into eight equal parts. I’d have all my zines for different subjects. Everytime we do zine making I encourage people to think about how they can use this technique in other things that they do; in their studying, in their work etc.

The concentration and decision-making that is inherently involved in creative processes allows zine-makers to explore their inner children, and access play through craft. Sometimes I would think that if I knew about zine making when I was a kid maybe now I would be a different person, doing something else. But I feel like it’s never too late to access these tools. When I'm zine-making I’m really healing my inner kid. You can see this very clearly in my work - everything is very playful and childlike. I love the idea of imperfection, and for everything to look very messy. It has a certain beauty. With the exception of her digital zine, ‘Lifelong Kindergarten’, Ioana’s zines begin unplanned and take shape through the creative process. I love not having an idea, and just to make something really bad sometimes. In workshops, I always encourage people to embrace messiness and make the worst thing they can, because that’s the best thing!!

This digital zine is her first of the kind, and retains a similar process to the ones produced in workshops. ‘Lifelong Kindergarten’ began as a series of analogue collage and zine pages made through the use of physically cutting and pasting, before being scanned and digitized. I did some doodling and added text digitally and some animations because I wanted to make it more interactive. Of course not everybody has a scanner but for me, zine making will always be handmade, it will always be cut and paste. Whilst not everybody has access to a scanner to make digital zines, their interactive nature can entice more people to get involved and expand Artizine’s community through their Instagram page. The concept of sharing is fundamental to zine-making, and social media can play a large and helpful role in this. 

Artizine maintains a focus on the importance of sustainability and community that is generated through the expression and sharing of ideas, reflecting the core idea of zines, which came about as an easy and accessible way to distribute information. We are reminded of Netflix’s recent original film ‘Moxie’, which centers around a group of students that create and circulate their own zine to combat the school’s sexist attitudes and behaviours. I’ve seen Moxie and I love it! I think that the central idea of this movie is to gather people together and light the fire for some change and action. A zine is kind of a call to action, right? You’re putting effort into making something, you’re writing down everything you want to speak about, you’re collecting materials. You’re committed to making things possible!

An ambitious goal of mine would be for Artizine to become a collective and work together on designing workshops and source creative opportunities together -  collaboration is key in everything. 

Artizine hopes to return to some real-life workshops in the summer. Collaboration remains a large part of their goals, and events have been planned for July. September sees Artizine participating in their first zine fair, where people will again be able to buy zine kits to raise funds to facilitate in-person workshops. I have a zine library with over 150 titles. I first started this in 2019 collecting zine donations from all around the world via post. A goal of mine would be to showcase this library somewhere alongside some of the zines we made in our workshops. These are the next steps, but with continuous collaborations, and a growing social media presence, the zine community’s only way is up. 

Follow @artizine on Instagram

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