Zines and Making Art: From the Classroom to BLTX

Elaine Claire Villacorta

Posted on October 7, 2024

The BLTX experience can only make sense if I delve into why I gave my ARTS1 classes the opportunity to engage with the culture that supports DIY publishing and self-produced arts and crafts. In fact, the overall experience actually begins with pedagogy.

THE PROCESS:

I’ve been teaching the GE course ARTS1 for about a year now, and I’ve had my students make zines as part of their creative projects. I introduce zines by tackling Form via image-writing and drawing pictures or comics from these written images. For the uninitiated, zines are self-published works on a small scale, or handmade DIY publications.

Lynda Barry’s Writing The Unthinkable exercise is the best way to illustrate (pardon the pun) how images can become form. I divide the exercise into two phases. Phase 1 deals with writing by hand in all its raw glory, through timed prompts. I give an image word, and my students are asked to come up with a list of ten things related to that image word. From that list, they pick one word and stay with that image. The timed prompts, being a series of directional questions, lead them in and around the image, and they are able to access what they remember about this particular image without really thinking long and hard about it (hence, writing the unthinkable).

Their post-image writing activity takeaways range from the process itself either being met with initial confusion to an actual breath of fresh air. Writing freely, as it turns out, is a luxury for these mixed majors. A student described the unfiltered nature of this writing process to be refreshing from all the self-editing he had gotten so accustomed to doing.

After introducing a new image word for the second round, the students were more relaxed. Post-classroom activity, I always remind them not to reread what they wrote until we collectively deal with the material again. That way, they will feel differently about their writing and approach it as if it were new again.

THE PRODUCT:

I usually set up creative work time in the classroom for Phase 2 of Writing the Unthinkable so that the students can get reacquainted with their raw written images. These images are transformed into a personal narrative of handwritten text and drawings (or sometimes just a narrative of drawings), the products being either an illustrated zine or mini-comic. During Midyear, however, the typhoon practically stole a week of F2F classes, and with the zine resources I shared as reference, they managed to figure out how to make zines on their own.

I ask my students to do a show-and-tell of these Unthinkable Zines, and the Midyear 2024 batch was no exception. Much like my previous batches of ARTS1 students, they expressed delight in having produced their own zines for the first time.

In sharing their respective image-to-form products, they initially tend to apologize for their lack of drawing skills. I always remind them that this particular zine project is not at all about possessing skills that established artists already have. It’s about rekindling with their own spark, something they had probably left behind as kids, because somewhere along the way, they had gotten self-conscious about their developing skills. On this note, they are highly encouraged to let go of self-judgments and to trust the process and enjoy it along the way. They are momentarily unlearning self-consciousness in writing and drawing out their true (or manifesting) stories by hand and turning them into zines. The embodied nature of zines, with the printed matter as evidence, is both an accessible and empowering site of production for everyone.

Of course, if I can’t entirely convince my students that they can be artists, at least I can convince them that they have become authors of self-published works.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH XEROXOGRAPHY (BLTX):

It’s no secret that my ARTS1 classes, a diverse mix of majors from BS Social Work, BS Chemical Engineering BS Materials Engineering BS Psych, BS Economics and AA Sports Science, were initially intimidated by visual art as well as having perceived the spaces for art being relegated only to museums and galleries. And so I made it a point to steer the art conversations and classroom activities toward decentering art from its institutional power.

Making a zine, however, means producing outside of this power. At the same time, I do acknowledge that the zine, as a non-institutional product, is still being introduced within the academe, particularly in the context of teaching a GE course.

What made Midyear 2024 exceptional was having BLTX as my ARTS1 academic field activity. Since the students already had a taste of zine making in the classroom, I wanted to open them up to a culture of participation surrounding self-publishing and independently produced arts and crafts, which had been flourishing for many years now.

BLTX, a yearly small press expo, is a site for DIY production and distribution that has long operated outside of mainstream publishing. Its negotiation of art production is continuously in flux, sometimes finding its way within sites and spaces for art discourse.

There was definitely something for everyone at BLTX. Some students made it earlier to catch the pre-expo zine forum. I caught its tail end to hear a couple of participants discuss the need for archiving zines as part of a tangential conversation that had taken place within the zine community prior. I was especially delighted by how spacious this forum was, literally in the open air, considering how these talks are normally held in smaller rooms that get packed rather easily. Those turnouts, regardless, are always a good sign, since the interest in zines has increased significantly over the years.

I had students who were drawn to the arts and crafts, most especially the stickers – ranging from cute overload to overt politics, at times colliding in a single form. Others took in the festive vibe and invested in experiences – like getting a henna tattoo, or live sticker drawing portraits on the spot.

A group of students also ended up spending a significant amount of time looking through the zine selection curated by the Studio Soup Zine Library. The library itself, which was on hiatus during the pandemic, made their zine archive available for browsing during BLTX expos in recent years. They just reopened their physical library at Cubao X last July.

The Studio Soup Zine Library set-up mainly consisted of zines on both a square table top and a sizable banig. Although some chairs were provided, they had created a cozy enough environment for sitting on the floor. At least 2 of my students acted on the eye-catchingly open invitation to annotate a zine on the table.

Students who invested in zines and indie comics from the expo resonated with topics such as cooking fried rice, cultural critique on karaoke, a quirky metaconcept on the basahan, film language, rejected grant proposals, city shapeshifting, turning 30 (which a couple of students actually daydream about, far off as it is for them), plus explorations of quietude, loneliness and grief.

A student introduced me to his parents, who decided to hang out at BLTX since the nearest mall was barely within proximity to the venue. His mother was impressed by how the culture of BLTX was not only creatively vibrant but also visibly engaged. She observed that the producers had their heads and hearts in the right place, and how it was both a warm and educative environment for socio-political awareness and timely issues, especially for students. Zinesters and artists empower regular and new readers alike, as well as aspiring artists, at times inspiring them to create their own work.

Prior to BLTX, I encouraged my students to converse with these creators. This gesture is reminiscent of the Artist & Perceiver activity that I also introduced during my ARTS1 classes, which is meant to break down the wall between both artist and perceiver by engaging both in conversation. While some may have been shy about it, others felt relaxed because they felt they were conversing with people who were just like them. The connections felt natural and real. Most creators are happy to share stories and personal processes behind their work. A pair of BA Broadcast Media Arts students even did a video shoot for their vlog and interviewed a couple of writers.

I had some of my own conversations with zine creators, photographers and artists in the context of teaching a GE arts course and how I managed to introduce my students to zine making. Most expressed delight at their presence in the expo, and how students can learn early on about taking control of producing their own work – that there is an alternative to how things are usually done in the world of publishing and art.

My students had also expressed their heartfelt appreciation for the presence of queer and feminist spaces within BLTX, and how it made them feel safe. Sometime in the late afternoon, Gantala Press – a feminist press – hosted a forum involving peasant women advocates, which one of my early bird students stayed for. The blanket-stitched banners – prominently displayed in the same room as the zine library, and where the forum took place – reflected a transformative power of the art of resistance, in the most sustainable of ways. The statements of protest were loud and clear in hand stitched glory on the ceaseless fight for agrarian reform.

From the very start, I had advised my students to bring a little spending money, should they resonate with zines or crafts that they may want to take home. Since zines have limited print runs, I assured them that BLTX “commerce” is the kind that directly supports the works of independent writers and artists. As one of my students pointed out, It is not a culture of hard selling – everyone is welcome to browse first and foremost. It’s a culture of reciprocity – of conversation starters, shared ideas and epiphanies, readership and connection, zine trading, production tips, and all kinds of presentations of creativity imaginable – and perhaps hysterically unimaginable.

Elaine Claire Villacorta is an assistant professor from the Department of Art Studies at UP Diliman. She has taken her passion for zine-making from the personal to the pedagogical. This way, students are encouraged to produce their own zines.