Amanda Keeley of Exile Tasks was one of many many exhibitors on the Ebook//Zine Honest. (All photographs by Rachel Wright)
On October 11, Atlanta-based nonprofit modern artwork journal Burnaway hosted its first annual Ebook//Zine truthful at Goat Farm, which attracted between 700 and 1,000 attendees, in response to organizers.
Bringing collectively creatives from 56 impartial and zine presses, together with 33 exhibitors who bought their work on the Honest’s “group room” desk, Ebook//Zine was the primary zine truthful in Atlanta since 2017, in response to Madeline Benfield, Burnaway’s packages and operations coordinator.
The Honest is a part of the zine format’s fashionable re-emergence, which has steadily grown in response to the ubiquity of social media and algorithmic tastemaking. This, Honest attendees and distributors agreed, is as a result of zines are precisely the sort of democratic, artistic, person-to-person communication many individuals lengthy for proper now.
In response to Emma Ok. Shibley of the zine One thing within the Water, the format’s energy comes from its freedom from the digital and financial calls for of up to date media. “It’s [often] only one individual’s imaginative and prescient,” she stated, “fully unfiltered or uncompromised by any of these exterior or conventional capitalist forces. Zine makers are in it for the love of the sport.”
Zines’ immediacy and accessibility are a part of the enchantment, agreed Diana Chu, half of the Milwaukee-based BearBear x Co. “Anybody with a pencil or a chunk of paper could make a zine,” she stated, explaining that makers increase on the format nevertheless they need.
Kailey Chin of Black Sheep Press stated that zines appeal to readers due to their bodily nature, calling the format the “the counterculture to the digital age.” “I feel persons are actually longing to get again to analog mediums,” Chin stated. “To carry issues of their fingers — to really feel what persons are placing out into the world as an alternative of wanting into issues digitally.”
That tactility was on full show amid the throngs of truthful attendees who cheerfully perused 1000’s of usually handmade zines and small-press books all through the day, chatting enthusiastically with the individuals who made them.
“How usually can I stroll right into a library or an artwork gallery or an artwork museum and actually speak to the one who made the factor that I’m interested in?” Chu requested. “It’s such a cool factor that we’re actually standing face-to-face over a desk, and we will truly contact issues” — in contrast to at gallery or museum, the place the artwork is off limits. “You may’t stroll right into a bookstore and discover this,” she added, gesturing to the full of life attendees.
“I feel zines make you very curious,” stated Amanda Keeley, founder and director of Miami’s EXILE Tasks, echoing Chu’s sentiment. “You sort of wish to peek inside and see what’s happening in somebody’s head.”
She defined that the shut creator-to-consumer dynamic is a significant draw at festivals like Ebook//Zine. “I at all times say that artists are like antennas,” she stated. “We choose up what’s happening in the neighborhood. And should you come to a zine truthful, you get to actually see what’s occurring inside your neighborhood.”
Benfield was inspired by Ebook//Zine’s success, seeing it as a sign that persons are hungry for extra entry to zines and artwork books. “The one factor I saved listening to all day was how a lot group was being constructed and the way actual connections had been forming,” she stated, including that she’d prefer to increase on the Honest sooner or later. “Subsequent yr, we’ll add extra packages, like panels and workshops and extra activations and collaborations with our exhibitors — I can’t wait!”
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Rachel Wright has a Ph.D. from Georgia State College and an MA from the College Faculty Dublin, each in artistic writing. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She is presently at work on a novel.