What are zines doing in a museum

In this page from ‘Zine-maker: a zine about zining’, creator Meg-John Barker confirms that zines “can be anything – any size, shape, quality, format”.

Many zines are a size and shape that is easy to reproduce, like a folded A5 booklet, but there isn’t a single standard shape to a zine. Barker’s zine is handwritten, with the appearance of a page torn from a ring binder, which means that even though this is a digital zine, it stays connected to the paper materials with which it was made. Where typewritten text can give a sense of disembodied authority, the handwriting makes the author more visible as a person.

'Contemplating researcher' is a zine made by Clara Searle during a workshop she led, which explored the experiences of PhD researchers of colour. The large pencil drawing that spills across all pages of the zine is visible only in fragments when the zine is folded. It was inspired by an illustration in the collections, labelled 'A Woman leaning wistfully on a large cushion'.

Searle describes being drawn to the image. However, rather than attempting to echo the sitter, she focuses on "the tiredness I feel when I catch myself sat in thought". Searle doesn’t have to tell us this though, the unfolded image conveys a deep fatigue, her face gently resting in her hands.

Third space knowledge

Loesja Vigour from the collections team explains how zines filled a gap in Wellcome’s collections, bringing “the voices of people talking about their health, living with health conditions and sharing their experiences of what it meant to them to be LGBTQ+, disabled, minoritised or excluded from the mainstream”. The zines offer valuable insight that often is missing from conventionally published materials. 

Some zines, rather than being straightforward accounts of their maker’s personal experiences, bring together lived experience with academic, professional and official knowledge – drawing connections between the different ways of knowing, blurring and blending them to create a new type of ‘third-space’ knowledge.

Third-space knowledge, as defined by academic and activist Adela C. Licona in her study of zines made by feminist, anti-racist zine makers of colour, is a form of knowledge that emerges from the space (or movement) between lived experience and professional or academic knowledge. It challenges the traditional boundaries between lived experience and medical practice, which institutions like Wellcome Collection have historically used to organise their collections.

The makers of ‘Swallow it whole’ aim “to create a Black women-centred zine, which integrates pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) messages with our existing sexual health concerns and represents us in our own image”. The zine combines information about PrEP, a medication that reduces the risk of getting the HIV virus, with collages, poems, prose and artwork around sexual health in general. The zine doesn’t treat PrEP, or the messaging around it, as something that people engage with in isolation from the rest of their experiences.

The creative offerings in this zine highlight the limitations of medical knowledge for engaging with experiences with PrEP. One of the contributors, Kuchenga describes a person aspect of taking PrEP: “Every morning, just after breakfast, I swallow something that gives me a reminder that my body is worth of protection”.

Medical diagnosis relies on privileging certain forms of knowledge; medical professionals have the authority to diagnose because they have specific training and education. The zine ‘Did it help?’ unpacks creator Heena’s experience of getting an autism diagnosis in their early 40s. They connect their present-day life and past memories to explore what it means to be autistic.

Heena’s sense of being autistic precedes the diagnosis, and they continue to reflect on the ways it “only explains things to an extent”. Throughout the zine, Heena holds onto the complexity of their lived experience and attempts to tease out the relationship between medical knowledge in the form of diagnosis, and their everyday life.

On a page of this pocket zine ‘The Problem of Knowledge’, PhD researcher Tamsin Walker illustrates a conversation between a group of people around a table. A figure in a t-shirt proposes a platform for survivor voices that have been excluded from mainstream mental health campaigns. The three figures in formal clothing undermine the value of this with their questions.

The quote beneath this illustration connects the conversation to the work of philosopher Miranda Fricker on ‘epistemic injustice’ – the result of undervaluing or dismissing the knowledge of someone because of their identity. An example of epistemic injustice is when the voices of people living with a particular condition aren’t present in museums or libraries because they aren’t academics or medical professionals. Walker’s zine invites us to tangle out epistemic injustice in real-life situations.

In crafting  ‘MadZine Methodology’, Jill Anderson and Hel Spandler from the MadZines project used the zine-making process to think with zines rather than just about them – making explicit how both research and zines create knowledge.  Usually, the final output from a research project is a book chapter or journal article, but here they are using the form of a zine to offer, or craft, a different form of knowledge. Rather than their research being separate from and potentially inaccessible to the people whose zines they’re studying, the makers are instead working in the same form.

Disrupting the museum

Sometimes, the content of a zine directly challenges the ways museums replicate or perpetuate stereotypes and systematic oppression in their categorisations or displays. The title of this zine, ‘The Blob’, is Charlotte Cooper’s name for a sculpture by John Isaacs, which was in the ‘Medicine Now’ exhibition at Wellcome Collection until 2019. This zine accompanied a dance performance by Cooper and Kay Hyatt at Wellcome Collection.

In the zine, Cooper explores the ways that this sculpture manifests a specific obesity discourse, reflects power, and fatphobia. The illustration from the zine details how she would like to give the Blob a warm blanket, a big comfy chair and send them texts, inviting them to hang out. This offering contrasts with the original exhibition display, which offered clinical display labels and the relentless gaze of visitors.

Zine culture in the museum

Alongside the development of the zine collection, Wellcome Collection has engaged with audiences and communities through a regular zine club, organised by staff, and through one-off zine workshops, inviting people to explore different themes and respond through their own zines which can be added to the collection.

In ‘Queering Wellcome Collection’ creator Rowan Frewin offers insights into specific objects in the rest of the collection, viewing these through current understandings of LGBTQ+ lives and experiences. Frewin responds not just to the presence of queer history in Wellcome Collection, but to its absence, and offers a different perspective on how these objects are recorded and presented in the collections, highlighting the epistemic injustice inherent in their misrepresentation or absence.

Collecting and presenting zines within a museum setting raises serious ethical questions. In response, the collections team at Wellcome developed an ethical framework for collecting and cataloguing zines. Zine makers are notified when their zines are acquired and consulted on how their work is described in the collection catalogue. Crucially, zine-makers can request their zines removed from the collection at any point.

Bringing zines into the Wellcome Collection not only introduced new voices and new perspectives on health and the human experience to the collections, it also introduced new ways of working with a collection. The approach the collections team took was shaped by the needs of the zines they were collecting, and this continues to shape Wellcome’s approach, for example in the exhibition ‘Zines Forever!’ and in the article you are currently reading.