~ / works / zine bundle 20242024 / publication

in autumn 2023, i visited ángeles¹. she showed me a miniature book. she had found it in the hallway of her apartment. i liked the little book. later, i read more about miniature books. i read about the schlachter bible, girdle books & an amulet quran. i followed all the hyperlinks on wikipedia.

a year later, i moved to rotterdam. moving is the loss of resources. i no longer have a studio. my work materials—cardboard, cables, soldering iron, instruments, paper drill, microphones, cable ties, scissors, speakers, sheets of paper, books, thread, batteries—are not with me. i only have a small table. the table is also our kitchen table. i don’t have much money. we are living off our savings. & i hardly know anyone here.

under these circumstances, my desire to print tiny books grows. on marktplaats, i buy a thermal printer. printing receipts means being given a small format without having to cut paper. & thermal prints are inexpensive. there is no need to buy ink or cartridges. only the thermal paper needs to be bought.

i think of andrew roach’s ‘small things manifesto’. the manifesto problematizes capital’s monopoly on making: the centralization of resources, technology & media in the hands of a few mega-corporations. roach writes about the effects of this centralization. the manifesto turns towards small, grassroots, democratic or anarchist initiatives, associations, open-source communities, individuals, zines, podcasts & punk. i read the manifesto on my 10-year-old laptop, in a browser on the web of the gemini protocol. gemini is an alternative, small internet without mega-corporations, advertising, tracking, bitcoin, or ai, whose hunger for energy produces emissions that manifest themselves as drought in somalia.

in my tiny books, i write about the tiny. my tiny is about the village community (‘water & wine’), but refuses simple positions (‘ancestors’). my tiny is non-intrusive (‘the fireworks’), leaving space for others (‘the window’) & choosing trust over control (‘playing together’). my tiny is about 100 more signs & experiments. but it is also about (my) pause & sleep.

my books are printed very slowly². i have time. there is no reason to hurry. my books will fade soon. because thermal prints bleach when exposed to heat. i, too, am fading. the fading is the human scale. the human scale is not the global (the large, permanent) scale (roach). the human scale is the tiny: it is temporary.