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186 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel)
Tanja Kapp | Journeying the Page
Countering Conventions: The Zine as Artefact of Resistance
Considering the intersection of medium- and genre-specific properties, the zine seems an aptly
chosen vehicle for a psychogeographical travelogue: it provides its creator with an abundance
of possibilities to form a narrative. Consequently, its experiential atmosphere welcomes assem-
blages of existing texts (intertextuality) or diverse media (intermediality). For example, zines
are formidable breeding grounds for what Irina Rajewsky, in her nomenclature of intermedi-
ality, deems ‘media combinations’: they are constituted of ‘at least two conventionally distinct
media or medial forms of articulation’ (Rajewsky 2005: 52). Zines offer their makers a blank
slate, allowing for the juxtaposition, approximation, sometimes even conflation, of pictorial and
semiotic signs and other literary or narrative entities. As is the case with the zines examined
here, travel is articulated in this medium not solely through the individual elements of text and
image but via the relationship of both. Indeed, it is the tension arising between these types of
signs placed on the page that conveys crucial aspects of spatial experience.
In recent years, the autobiographical zine (or ‘perzine’, short for personal zine) in particular
seems to have attracted greater interest from creators and readers alike (Douglas and Poletti
2017: 180). In addition, the proliferation of travel zines is evident when searching the web and
attending zine fairs. As this study has shown, such developments are intimately linked with
ongoing debates around the individual’s participation and place in a thoroughly interconnected
world. As is the case with many travel accounts, psychogeographical writing is a genre amalgam
of life writing and travel writing, with elements of philosophical writing, political pamphlets,
and (critical) theory. Being designed as ‘anti-magazines’, zines are often presented as theoretical
counterparts, foils to be read against the grain of the publications and discourses they oppose.
In the case of travel, zines tend to interrogate things that have been left unsaid and spaces
that have been left untraveled, pushing writers and readers to question contemporary travel
behaviour and ideas. Insofar as zines articulate alternatives or offer answers to institutionalized
media — whereby these opposites are materially absent but conceptually present through their
cultural influence — they are also unconsciously quoting these media in order to undo them.
Contemporary zines thus correspond not only to magazines, but also to online media such as
blogs. Through their material presence as physical artefacts, as spatially and temporally limited
publications, they present alternatives to media that are (or at least claim to be) available to
everyone everywhere. Above all, they are committed to showing how the situated experiences
and mediations of the world are both local and global, real and imagined, particular and uni-
versal, and subject to constant change.
Due to formal requirements, this study took only a first glimpse into the vast world of psy-
chogeographical zines, and consequently leaves out further considerations about this medium’s
form-specific existence, not only regarding other shapes of intermediality, but also concerning
its transmediality, multimodality, or intertextuality. However, the media-specific qualities of
the zine discussed here may be able to give first ideas about their proliferation in documenting
radical walking: The discursive history and inherent openness of the zine intersects with the
psychogeographer’s willingness to offer opposition to commonly accepted assumptions about
self, environment and cultural production. As ideologically charged acts of counterculture, the
practices of zine making and psychogeography revolve around creating resistance. The walks
represented in Personal Geography and A Long Walk invert common ideas about living in
>mcs_lab>
Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020
The Journal
- Title
- >mcs_lab>
- Subtitle
- Mobile Culture Studies
- Volume
- 2/2020
- Editor
- Karl Franzens University Graz
- Location
- Graz
- Date
- 2020
- Language
- German, English
- License
- CC BY 4.0
- Size
- 21.0 x 29.7 cm
- Pages
- 270
- Categories
- Zeitschriften Mobile Culture Studies The Journal