After making Art & Copy for six months of 2025, sometimes interviewing people in Phnom Penh who are well-known for their work and efforts here, I am wondering. Could zining in Cambodia be more than just us folks who like to write and draw sharing our ideas together? Could it bring more stories to more places, like this issue:
This made me think: why not make more zines to share Cambodia’s stories elsewhere? It’s easy to do. Make, and take.
Can a simple publishing tool like ‘zines’ help people better capture and archive stories in Cambodia? Or do even more to connect Khmer culture and the wider ASEAN region?
A zine that is local in content can work both to bring stories outside but also, to help internally, too. Editors of these can contextualize what’s happening so that people can see what ways there are that their local problems relate to bigger ones, across the region.
Zines have a short shelf life. They can breathe, they can expand, they can come and go, become new quickly. This is why I like them. Short and sweet. Quickly prototyping. Sharing, seeing what sticks, resonates. Moving to the next issues, from there.
RESEARCHERS. When we think of research, information, and education, we usually think of universities, journals, textbooks, schools, media outlets. Zines don’t replace those—but they can play complementary roles. Because they allow experimentation, zines can try out alternative ways of telling stories or conveying data: visualizations, mapping, combining art and science, integrating oral history, non‐linear narratives. Some of these innovations, having proven useful, might be adopted in mainstream or formal education or academia. Zines make it possible for people without PhDs or institutional affiliation to conduct research, write about it, share it. That helps diversify whose knowledge is visible.
Sometimes modest consistent production is more impactful than ambitious but infrequent works. For help with making zines, ask me about Art & Copy. Upcoming opportunities are here: https://designkompany.com/art-copy
How can zines be used outside of art? Thinking and adding more to the conversations that unfold.