• Sat 13 04 2019 •
COPY IT The Rapid Publisher – Live Action Zine-Making

With THE RAPID PUBLISHER

15:00 – 22:00

Venue: Academyspace, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Köln
In German and English language
Free admission


“I can write anything and just put it in a zine, and then it’s out there. It is like blogging but on paper. It is what I started to do before the computers were all popular.” - Mark Gonzales (artist, poet and skateboarder)

In the 1970s, zines – creatively designed DIY publications – conquered London’s punk scene. What commercial magazines failed to report was artistically communicated by young activists, artists and (hobby) authors. Free from publishers and guidelines, they created the small print runs at their own expense. In the context of feminist movements, pop-cultural and political content was increasingly introduced in the 1990s.

Zines reflect the stories of various sub-cultures and youth cultures, giving a voice to political positions that rebel against the conservative mainstream. Today, it is mainly PoC and queer positions that enrich zines with new discourses.
Zines are all about expressing oneself in a safe space, bringing together people with similar interests or views, creating critical stimuli and giving rise to a multi-layered “cultural identity” within the counter-movement(s). As Urs Gasser aptly states in his essay “The culture of sharing is contained in our DNA”, copying is life’s “natural form of communication”. We’d like to spend an afternoon celebrating the versatile possibilities of collective copying with THE RAPID PUBLISHER.

The Rapid Publisher means: a room full of people, an evening of cold drinks; your brain meets the copier, and you create a zine with your own hands!

Every few seconds, the Triumph-Adler 2256 copier spits out your pictures, your text and dripping sweat. Nico Bergmann and Torben Röse pick up the pages, staple them together and give shape to your thoughts. Every five minutes, a form, a zine – the work of God or a pile of sheets. Either is fine, YYY TUT!