What sort of imagery do you go for when making a zine? Do you have an aesthetic you stick to every time or do you change it up?

This is our first zine so we don’t know yet and we love to surprise ourselves. We work with drawings and photography so our work generally includes these mediums. However, we know that we like to experiment and do unexpected things. We love to challenge ourselves and others and we get bored easily.

 

How can people get hold of the zine? Will there be another laminated zine in future?

There is only one physical copy of the zine. Jessica Mitchell and I wanted to make a single edition zine for sharing and not selling. The zine is currently on a world tour and we hope to get it to every continent. It started its journey at Typewronger bookshop in Edinburgh, Scotland, is headed to The Sticky Institute in Melbourne, Australia next before going to Uncharted Books in Chicago USA for May. We also have it booked in for the Cupola Contemporary Art Gallery in Sheffield, England for whenever lockdown eases! People can see a full pdf of the zine on our websites www.jessicamitchell.art or www.diogo-duarte.com or Insta pages @jessicamitchellfrombrookly and @ddimagemaker. We have just started up Sour Press where we publish our zines and we are already working on new creations. We aren’t sure if there will be another laminated version – maybe – but, we got this idea as part of our response to the covid pandemic and we are hoping to see the back of this dreadful time soon.
Keep an eye on our Instagrams as in future, once ‘Birth’ has finished its tour of the continents via bookstores and art galleries we plan on sharing with individuals around the world who want to spend some time with it.

 

What was the motivation behind the zine? Any distinct messages you want to get across?

Jessica and I have been friends and artistic collaborators for years. We found it really hard to be apart for long periods during lockdowns and we wanted to find a way of still working together. ‘Birth’ let us do that – find ways of bringing our long conversations about life into image form. We also really missed communicating with others via art at this time and were getting bored with online shows. It seemed a great idea to create a physical object that could travel to places people couldn’t. We got the idea for lamination partly as a practical response to there being just one edition but this was also a response to all of the endless hygiene and cleanliness messages during the pandemic. It also makes it special – it is an art work in its own right. The zine isn’t for sale as we just really wanted to share at this time.
‘Birth’ dwells on creation and destruction and spins an ephemeral web of meaning making around fertility and connectedness in this time of isolation and sterility. The zine is an experiment in anti-materialism as it is not for sale. Jessica and I are both interested in mythology, symbols, cave paintings – and we wanted to make a zine that brought together these interests. We like to create characters who seem both human and godlike. We don’t generally see our work as full of ‘messages’ but, of course, we feel it is interesting and important to show an older woman’s body in a magical kind of way, where she appears free, in control and powerful. We also stand for collaborative ways of working. We came to be friends and collaborators yet are quite different and we love the way these differences help us to create what we feel are interesting works.