Fanzines (often abbreviated to zines) have always been an edgy, fast-paced form of publishing. In many cases, they are made at home with few resources — scissors, glue, and a photocopier — and are often surprisingly similar to the experimental magazines self-produced by various artists during the second half of the 20th century. Thanks to the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura, the Mart preserves the largest Italian collection of these publications.

With origins in underground youth and in particular, music cultures, fanzines adopt a lo-fi style, mixing words, images, graphics and photography in a direct aesthetic, often in black and white, favouring immediacy over elegance.

Photocopied pages, cut-and-pasted texts and flawed graphics become the visual language of a generation that prefers urgency to order, authenticity to gloss. Fanzines do not seek approval: they shout, whisper and tell stories. And they do so with the means at their disposal.

The exhibition Fanzine! The rough appeal of DIY publishing presents, for the first time, a selection of Italian fanzines from the 1980s and 1990s that have become part of the Archivio del '900 heritage over the last two years, thanks to small and large donations. This valuable collection consists primarily of materials from Piermario Ciani’s archive, but also includes collections donated by Cesare Assenzio, Paolo Chang, Daniele Ciullini, Paolo Della Grazia, Jenamarie Filaccio, Guido Andrea Pautasso and Miguel Piccolrovazzi. Taken as a whole, this body of works opens up new avenues of research into the Mart’s book heritage, and interacts with the numerous experimental materials already in the Library, such as artist’s books and magazines, livres de peintre and volumes about the historical avant-garde.

The selection focuses mainly on the 1980s, the golden decade of zines, with titles such as Arte Postale!, Harpo’s Bulletin, 115/220, Onda 400, Attack punkzine, T.V.O.R. – Teste Vuote Ossa Rotte, Stanza 101 and Musique mecanique, the latter with bizarre attachments such as plastic roses and engine grease. Each zine reflects a musical and countercultural identity, from the punk of Punkaminazione to the dark sounds of Amen, the Jamaican sound of Ital Raggae and the noise of Idola Tribus.

In the 1990s, desktop publishing introduced new themes and aesthetics.

The titles on display include Lamer Xtrerm in Neuronet (cyberpunk, bound with a bolt), Cyberpunk videozine (VHS), Luther Blissett. Rivista mondiale di guerra psichica, Unexpected communication and Torazine, as well as publications more closely tied to the world of entertainment, such as the free press Riviera beat.

Finally, recent zines are represented by Disegni matti and Vinile rotto, highlighting the contemporary creative energy of DIY publishing.

The exhibition also includes Brain cell, a Japanese mail art zine by Ryosuke Cohen, and the Mart preserves the first 550 issues of this title, all available in the museum’s Digital Library on the Internet Archive.

Beyond the exhibition

The themes of the exhibition will be explored in greater depth at the event Fanzine: il lato punk dell’editoria [Fanzine: the punk side of publishing], on Wednesday 19 November at 5:30 pm. In the foyer of the Archivio del ‘900, Marco Philopat, writer, publisher, activist and scholar of underground cultures, will talk to Duccio Dogheria, Archivio del ‘900 Mart.

The evening will finish with a jam session of zines from the digital library: https://archive.org/details/radical-archives