Zino Loci

Dr Jac Batey, Associate Professor in Illustration MA, writes about a collaborative zine project between students and alumni at the University of Portsmouth, UK and Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. The project was internally supported by CCI through the Illustration Research Group.

I’m writing as the curator of the Zineopolis art zine collection at the University of Portsmouth where I also run MA Illustration. Our collection of art zines are self-published limited-edition publications on any theme, mostly made by artists or visual practitioners. We have over 500+ and use them as a valuable teaching and research resources in the School of Art, Design and Performance.

We recently completed a collaborative project called Zino Loci which came about through conversations between myself and Nicolas Verstappen, a colleague at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. The zine was to allow artists to tackle the challenges of representation, for example how do you draw pain, jealousy or anxiety? Through discussions we started talking about the feelings of ‘guilt’ related to Art & Design, the anxiety of missing deadlines or of not being good enough. The familiar background angst of the artist knowing a project needed attention then led us on to discuss ‘shame’ or the feeling of being ‘ashamed’ initially thinking about the embarrassment of creating poor work, mixed in with the feeling of disappointment, i.e., ‘Letting people down’.

Nicolas commented that for his students in Thailand, ‘shame’, especially bringing shame on your family, seemed much more of an issue than ‘guilt’ and we wanted to explore whether there was indeed a cultural difference at play - Western-guilt as opposed to Asian-shame.

Zino Loci Issue One brings together students and alumni of Portsmouth and Chulalongkorn as they explore this theme. You can read more about the project here.

I wrote more about the project for the ‘Shame and Medicine’ blog, which is part of an interdisciplinary research project that is based at the University of Exeter and the University of Birmingham, with a collaboration with a clinical partner at Children’s Health, Ireland, in Dublin.

Zino Loci was printed in a limited edition and is now permanently housed in many special collections in the UK, such as the V&A Library, The British Library, Tate Britain, The Glasgow School of Art, and the Royal College of Art.

It has also gone international, with copies now in the USA in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, Long Beach Public Library in California and the San Francisco Public Library. They are also located in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Belgium, Colombia, The National Library of Australia, Brazil, Canada, The Philippines, Chile, Japan and Argentina.