Stay Small!
Notes on the micro-publishing internship at Pulp Paperworks
The publication, titled Artists’ lo-fi, DIY and Alternative Publications in South Africa, is the tangible outcome of the public roundtable discussions that accompanied the exhibition lo-fi street cred: artist’s zines, DIY and alternative publications held on 10 August 2024 at the Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts (JGCBA), Wits Art Museum (WAM), University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). The theme of the roundtable was What value do printed zines and DIY publications offer in a digital age? The discussants were Minenkulu Ngoyi from Alphabet Zoo; Dr. Rangoato Hlasane, Eva-Rose Lundon and Nokukhanya Sibanda from the Department of Fine Arts, Wits University; Neil Badenhorst, Musa Malobola and Ditshegofatso Maoto from the Department of Graphic Design at the University of Johannesburg; Nina Torr, Maaike Bakker, Philisiwe Memela and Callum Sutherland from Open Window, Centurion, and David Paton moderated the event. Each discussant has contributed to the texts that are included in this publication to which Cape Town-based artist Jonah Sack (whose works were included on the exhibition and the cover of its posterzine catalogue) as well as Victoria Wigzell (director of Johannesburg-based Pulp Paperworks) have contributed reflective writings on their communal practices.
Below is a contribution to this publication by Pulp’s director, Victoria Wigzell
In 2022, Pulp was vastly different from what it is now. I was mainly working alone, having kept my fledgling bookbinding business open during the pandemic and its subsequent shockwaves. I produced small bindings to sell in my studio (at that time a third of the size it is now) and did commissioned work when it came up. Stephan Erasmus had joined me some months before and was working with me part-time.
While alone in the studio one afternoon, Oteng Kopiso walked in as part of a tour of young artists through Victoria Yards. We immediately got into a conversation about the zines that she was making at the time, and how she might produce a range of notebooks of her own to market to bookstores. A few days later she got in touch and asked if she could do an internship with Pulp. This was not something I had considered before. I had to ask some questions about how to ensure that any engagement through an internship would not be exploitative but based on fair exchange.
Immediately, I decided to offer Oteng the opportunity to produce her own publication, which was the perfect solution to this question. I didn’t have the cash flow to take on a new full-time employee, and internships by their nature tend to be either unpaid or paid based on ‘stipends’ and not salaries. A stipend is not enough to live on, but the offer of an internship goes beyond the mere transaction of time-based employment to something more critical in our competitive economy — experience.
I began to take more seriously the experience and equipment that I had built up over the few short years of Pulp’s existence: the small machines gradually acquired and the potential therein to pursue creative projects, if someone is willing to give the time. I had always wanted to take this direction but had never taken seriously the potential in our setup just as it was, because I was always working just to keep the rent paid and materials coming on time. After a candid discussion about learning, stress, communication, and working in survival mode, Oteng became our first intern, and Pulp’s micropublishing practice began.
Oteng, Stephan, and I immediately clicked. Somehow, the amount of commissioned work we were receiving increased, and we were quickly churning out batches of branded notebooks and creative publications together. We had weekly workshops where we taught Oteng all of the essential bindings that we knew. However, when it came time for us to discuss what Oteng’s publication would be, her proposal went beyond all of our expectations for what an artist’s book or creative publication and binding could be.
Entitled ‘Oracle’, this book consists of a pair of oracle decks in the form of earrings to be worn with the user/reader’s choice of that day’s oracle card on display. An oracle deck is a spiritual card system where the imagery and associated meanings are generated by the user. What became clear through all of our interactions with visitors to the studio, is that this book had an appeal towards multiple audiences. It has been bought equally for its collectability as an artist’s book and as a quotidian, functional accessory with individualized spiritual significance. One thing I wish I could be a part of is the conversations generated around each one as it makes its way into the wider public domain. I have never seen our developing publishing work as anything other than ‘micro’ in nature. Each one of these books was sold by one of us through a conversation, and it’s the continual conversations (even the ones we don’t know are happening) that hold the value in this micro-practice.
Oracle, by Oteng Kopiso (2022)
Speaking of value, Oracle also proved itself to be a financial success — in a micro sense, of course. The proceeds from Oracle are nowhere near enough to support Pulp’s business as a whole, but as a venture on its own, it continues to generate a little profit that benefits both Pulp and Oteng personally to this day.
With the success of Oracle and the fact that our openness to growth had also somehow led to a rapid increase in our workload, Oteng, Stephan and I found ourselves sitting down once again to select new interns from an open call. We were stunned by the response, and a great many of the applications were so strong that we didn’t know how we were going to be able to make a decision. The main surprise for me was that so many people were interested and invested in bookbinding as a practice, and took seriously its value as a creative practice in particular. The few years I spent struggling to get Pulp on its feet were lonely times, in part exacerbated by the struggle to find people willing to do the physically hard, mundane, and repetitive work that is bookbinding. I was suddenly amazed to see a community coalescing around a practice so many consider obsolete.
Odette Graskie and Griffen Alexander were the next two interns to work with us. Each of their publications is equally reflective of their unique practices. Odette, an artist with her own well-established studio practice, works with intricately cut layers of paper; these fragmented sheets contain pieces of hand-drawn portraits taken during drawing sessions the artist usually holds in the gallery space. During our interview, Odette showed us artist books that she had created — transposing her sculptural installations to the book form. Ultimately, her proposal for a publication was a portraiture activity book, entitled Unfolding Together, where the reader can be taken, with prompted activities, through Odette’s thought process on the act of drawing a portrait and its permutations.
Unfolding Together, by Odette Graskie (2023)
Griffen, a young writer who had recently graduated from a Wits Creative Writing honours course, came to the interview with all of his own experimental and playful bindings in hand. He told us that his primary interest in the internship was to learn as much as possible about bookbinding, but in terms of content, his publication would be a short story. Entitled Mother Microbial, this pocket-sized book holds a kafka-esque, sci-fi piece of interconnected vignettes, where each character, seemingly unrelated to one another, finds themselves drawn to the moment of collectively ingesting a drug that induces a blissful moment of shared consciousness.
Mother Microbial, by Griffen Alexander (2023)
Both Griffen and Odette ended up staying on to work part-time as bookbinders after their internships ended. This was a moment when we felt very much at the limits of our capacity, and we did not consider taking on another intern for some time. However, I received an email from someone whose application I had seen from our open call the previous year. Alexandra Greenberg, a final-year Fine Arts student, was persistently asking to work with us. We relented, and after a few months of volunteering on Fridays, Alex became our most recent intern. Alex was making use of the opportunity to produce book objects that would also relate to their final year body of work. This saw them coming in on weekends to practice very complex caterpillar stitches, which Stephan had graciously taught them in his spare time. For their publication, entitled ‘Mythologies Volume 1: The Mother and The Monster ’ and ‘Mythologies Volume 2: The Lover and The Loop’ Alex chose to re-create in book form animated videos of four sketched archetypes taken from their interpretation of interrelations in daily life. Through these animations, Alex seeks to undo and recreate these archetypes through their failure to perform themselves.
Mythologies Volume 1: The Mother and The Monster ’ and ‘Mythologies Volume 2: The Lover and The Loop’, by Alexandra Greenberg (2024)
It is now November 2024, and Pulp has expanded into its new 160 square-meter home and has opened a pop-up retail shop in collaboration with good friends at Edition Verso. We are setting up for an evening discussion about the four publications produced as part of the two years of Pulp’s internship programme. Everyone is nervous, setting up benches, and fans to curb the extreme heat, furiously arranging and rearranging the setup of the furniture. As we sat ourselves in front of our small group of guests — almost entirely made up of the close friends and family of Oteng, Odette, Griffen, and Alex — I began to think about how crucial each one of these people, and their work, has been in the evolution of Pulp from a one-person operation into a small, caring and supportive community.
Some of the evening’s discussion hung on our ‘each one teach one’ approach to training a new intern. A previous intern, or trainee, would be tasked with teaching what they had been taught to the next person who comes in. There had become a real sense of care in how everyone supported each other in the execution of their work; the attention given to the skill in this execution began to show the care given for the content of each project. An audience member, who is an academic from the field of Sociology, commented that this is a prime example of non-alienated labour. The act of work, each person taking control of the means of production and materializing their own creative output, is in this case intrinsic to the value of the self. This modest moment of sharing with those most loved by each of our past interns was for me a critically affirming moment of engagement and feedback, some of which sat on the ‘micro’ in ‘micropublishing’.
There is someone in the bookbinding world called Tino The Bookbinder. He is the biggest game in commercial bookbinding in Johannesburg and runs a factory of 1500 square meters at the age of 84. I had known of Tino for a long while before I had the opportunity to meet him. As we greeted each other for the first time, he said something to me that has stayed with me since: “Victoria, stay small!”. Staying small, when so much in business is determined by growth and upward trajectory is proving to be somewhat a practice in itself. However, the advice rings beyond just the nuts and bolts of Pulp as a business, but also in our intentions behind the creation and dissemination of these publications.
Without funding, ‘staying small’ actually means more room for play and experimentation. I have not until now mentioned that every publication is assigned by us the same modest budget of R1500.00, which must cover all materials required. There have been many negotiations on this across these four publications, and a notable moment was Odette using the sales of the first 10 copies of Unfolding Together to purchase the necessary materials to produce the remaining 73 in her edition. This limitation is there, not only because we don’t have more money to spend than that, but also as a challenge to each author to make strategic decisions around the form that will best speak to their content. These decisions often end up being more playful, a pair of earring books being the prime example. Each person has also learned a huge number of new skills — whether a part of their planned training or not. Alex seeking out help outside the studio while screenprinting their own covers, and Griffen troubleshooting problems with our imposition software are two moments that come to mind. Struggling with making, and succeeding in the end, is to my mind as valuable as the end product itself.
Staying small means that the most critical moments around a publication’s success are in the very genuine conversations had with strangers in the studio, not with the hope that someone will buy it, but for the joy of being able to share it. Staying small means the freedom to do things on our terms, to embrace a diversity of practices rather than following curated lines of messaging to which all output must conform. As I write this, we have just finished selecting our new interns for the year — we have now received an enormous number of applications, and some from other countries as well! The applications have centered almost entirely around the projects themselves, and we are looking forward to sharing this wide variety of challenging and experimental projects with our community through 2025 and beyond.
