Homestead’s Zine Hut

by Nic Fife, Homestead Park’s first artist in Residence

Homestead Park has a new (tiny) building! Planning permission was granted (we asked the squirrels and birds and they courteously agreed), and new residents (zines) are starting to move in already! Everyone is welcome to use this new hut as a place for the exchange and gifting of small trinkets and treasures!

The original intention was for the hut to be a place for zine exchanges, but obviously it’s not limited to zines. Almost immediately when we installed it, we noticed people leaving beautiful things inside that they’d presumably found in the park. Choice pine cones, interesting leaves, nice rocks. Like a good zine, the worth of these objects doesn’t come from their scarcity, it comes from their abundance and mundane beauty. What precious, worthless, priceless treasures will you exchange?

The hut stands as a humble work of art in its own right. With Jai’s skill and enthusiasm, we built it almost entirely out of reclaimed bit of wood found in the park. The starting point was to have a physical place where people can exchange things. A microcosm of what it would be like if we all gave gifts more freely and existed in reciprocity with each other. 

I’ve been making and distributing and exchanging zines for a while, and it’s nice to have something like a third space for zines, somewhere safe to leave them for strangers to find. Normally, this has been cafes, libraries, and the like. But the park doesn’t (yet) have anywhere like that, somewhere that’s regularly and predictably open to the public. Print is powerful, but what do you do when the printed material lives behind a locked door? And in the case of the park, what do you do about the fact that printed materials are inherently not very well suited to the Great British Outdoors? In our case, this involved building a tiny indoors. 

Since the residency was centred around the idea of ‘gifts’ (the park as a gift, the land as a gift, and specifically gifts as an invitation for reciprocity) what better infrastructure to leave behind than a place where people can exchange gifts. Some of the first zines to go into the hut are zines about zines. Instructions on how to fold them, prompts on what to make them about, invitations to create freely and from the heart. I hope that you’ll come and take these gifts, given freely, and use them to create more gifts for others!