DOING THINGS TOGETHER. PUBLISHING AS A COLLECTIVE PRACTICE – a manifesto!
Chapter 1 – A PERSONAL MANIFESTO
My name is Michal Chojecki.
I am an artist, researcher, and publisher.
I run independent press Oficyna Peryferie
I make artist publications and zines.
Chapter 2 – DO IT YOURSELF
Historically, zines have been the simplest and easiest way to communicate,
especially for those who didn’t have access to mainstream media.
You have no voice?
Make your own medium.
Make a zine.
Take the pencil, take the paper, use the photocopier.
Start your own press.
Do it yourself.
Chapter 3 – THE DIGITAL SHIFT
However, physical printed pamphlets have many limitations:
printing, binding, disseminating…
So much effort for so limited a result.
In the late 90s, digital media gave hope
that we could go beyond those limitations.
The rise of the World Wide Web, blogs, and finally social media
seemed like a perfect chance to extend the idea of the zine
as a grass-rooted, democratic form of communication.
A promise of the Internet as a global network of independent voices
— it was a key factor that turned independent communication online
and, by the way, killed printed zines.
Chapter 4 – DISILLUSIONMENT
Twenty years later, we woke up in a totally different reality.
No one still believes that the Internet is free, decentralized,
and belongs to the people.
We communicate relying on algorithms owned by a few mega-corporations,
for whom our perception is a commodity for sale.
We cannot trust anything we see and hear online.
Dealing with fake news, fake data, fake reality
is one of the most important challenges we face nowadays.
Chapter 5 – THE RENAISSANCE OF PRINTED ZINES
My practice as an artist, researcher, and publisher
is about exploring a new perspective on zines
— one meaning different in the third decade of the XXI century.
What we experience now is what I call the renaissance of printed zines.
Zines offer something the Internet can’t:
a sense of presence, materiality, and real connection between people.
What makes the difference in the post-digital reality
is attention to paper, the printing process, and binding style —
the whole material form of a publication.
In the post-digital world, zines are not just media.
They are rituals of care — self and social.
Each printed page becomes a gesture of resistance
against high pace, noise, and forgetting.
Zines always carry a statement.
Chapter 6 – ROOTS AND RESISTANCE
Let’s put a private perspective on this.
I was born in 1985 in Warsaw, capital of the People’s Republic of Poland.
My early childhood coincided with the collapse of the communist regime.
My parents were graphic designers.
Graphic design back then was more of a craft.
Due to lack of technology,
they worked without computers, just manual tools.
I remember being fascinated by how,
when they wanted to design something,
they had to invent a method of making it.
That’s how the seed of DIY was planted in my young head.
Equally important was their involvement in the underground press movement
as part of the political opposition.
I assumed at that time that:
books are so important that you can risk your freedom for publishing,
they can be made outside industrial and official production systems,
and making books, printing, and publishing is a way
to question the surrounding reality.
Chapter 7 – RISO AS SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE
I started my press Oficyna Peryferie in January 2014,
and soon after bought my first Riso machine.
For the last (almost) twelve years, I’ve been exploring
artistic potencial of low-tech duplication.
I’ve been printing books, zines, graphics, ephemera.
Attending and conducting workshops,
listening to lectures, reading manuals,
joining discussion groups, doing residencies,
and working in different formats with different people.
I’m still amazed at how this crazy machine
has influenced the publishing scene in my bubble.
What I learned is that Riso is not only a printing machine.
It is a social infrastructure.
Every Riso studio I know exists in networks —
it doesn’t only produce prints.
It produces communities.
It connects people through shared challenges,
limitations, and fixing mistakes.
Even if Oficyna Peryferie was supposed to be
a label for my own publishing practice as an artist,
soon I realized that publishing is a collaborative practice.
Chapter 8 – DOING IT TOGETHER
In recent years, I’ve run a few collective formats at Oficyna Peryferie:
A Riso Print Club — a shared print studio,
A Crit Club — a discussion group for collective learning,
Warsaw Zine Library — a reading room for artistic publications.
Together, these formats and collaborations form an ecosystem,
extending Oficyna Peryferie beyond publishing books and zines.
They turn it into a platform are laboratories of doing-it-together.
Chapter 9 – ZINES AS CONNECTION
For me, a zine is never only a private work.
A zine without circulation is just a notebook.
It becomes alive only in the hands of others.
That’s why distribution is not just logistics.
It is meeting another human being.
Like sending a letter, not shipping a product.
Chapter 10 – SCALING DOWN DESIGN
I came to a moment when I started to understand that
every project is born from a relation.
I meet people, we talk, and we try to extract something
that can only exist between us.
The publication is a trace of that relationship,
it always points toward others:
friends, readers, communities.
Zines are not about isolation.
They are about belonging.
Maybe this is what our publishing agenda is today —
not the distribution of information,
but the building relationships that matter.
Zines may look small, fragile, even naïve —
but they carry something that professional design often forgets:
honesty, and freedom from purpose.
Maybe the future of communication
is not only about scaling up —
but also about scaling down,
to the size of a single printed page,
passed from hand to hand.
Warsaw, 24.10.2025
Michał Chojecki / Oficyna Peryferie