Impact7

Dr Anna Poletti

Country

AUS

Affliliation

Monash University, Australia

Biography

Anna Poletti is a lecturer in English and researcher in the Centre for the Book at Monash University. She is a member of the management committee of Sticky Institute, and was a founding member of the This Is Not Art festival collective. Her research examines the intersection of narrative and form in self-published and homemade autobiographies. She has published articles on Australian zines, digital storytelling, PostSecret, and Jonathan Caouette_s auto/biographical documentary Tarnation. Her book, Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture, was published in 2008 by Melbourne University Press.

Panel

Reifying zines: a roundtable discussion of the relationship between ephemera and institutions

Panellists

Chair: Anna Poletti (AUS)

Sasha Grishin (AUS)

Luke Sinclair (AUS)

John Stevens (AUS)

Teal Triggs (UK)

Abstract

Archive, (re)contextualisation, visibility, prestige: institutions such as galleries, libraries, universities and publishing houses have a lot to offer underground art forms. Through studying and showcasing their products and practices, institutions can widen the audience for these forms and help sustain them. However, the relationship subcultures and the inherently mainstream and bureaucratized institution can be fraught with dangers. For some, like queer filmmaker and zinester Bruce LaBruce such a relationship is ridiculous:
''queercore' fanzines aren't supposed to be catalogued and historicised and analysed to death, for Christsake. They're supposed to be disposable. That's the whole point. Throw your fanzines away right now. Go ahead. Xeroxed material doesn't last forever anyway, you know. It fades'.

This roundtable will bring together scholars, collectors and practitioners for a discussion of the pleasures and dangers of bringing the ephemeral and subcultural print culture of zines into contact with the institution. We will consider how zines can be a means of challenging the protocols of the institution, how the institution can seek to make zines respectable, and the interesting and potentially productive tensions that arise when two very different ways of thinking, practising and valuing print collide. In doing so we will find ourselves considering the broader issues of self-publishing, visibility and institutions. 

Date

Friday 30 September

Session

Speaking

Email

Website