zine bundle 2024

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

a year later, i move 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 the capital’s monopoly on making, i.e. the centralization of resources, technology & media in the hands of a few mega-corporations. roach problematizes the resulting effects. the manifesto empowers 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, without 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 slowly¹. 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.

thermal printers are actually fast, but i don’t send text to my printer, only images. my text is also stored on my computer as an image. transferring the images from the computer to the printer is slow.↩︎