I am an organizer with Babycastles, a New York collective fostering and amplifying diverse voices in videogame culture, a member of Flux Factory, and have organized with several other artist-run spaces and collectives. These kinds of DIY organizations are volunteer-led, often with limited resources. Documentation of the activities of these powerhouse art communities is generally an afterthought as resources are limited and efforts are spent organizing and getting the word out about events, or informally documenting and posting to social media platforms. As these precarious organizations get rocked by the pandemic as well as broader economic forces, I thought it was a useful moment to take stock of one long-running and celebrated DIY arts organization.
Space 1026 was forced to move to a new location right before the pandemic due to the landlord selling the building. The process of building a healthy community and responding to multiple challenges isn't simple, and there are few resources out there for how artist collectives and communities can organize and operate. I was excited to work with a community I already know and have worked with before (as a curator, artist, zine-maker, and performer) and to create something useful for the collective as well as the public. In conversation it was revealed that zine requests (from arts organizations, museums, and libraries around the world) are often sent to Space 1026—and I imagined I could help respond to that need. As one of the long-running activities of the collective is to produce zines, it was an obvious choice for me to have that be an important "output" of this archiving effort. These zines can then be both an artistic work as well as a publication option for sharing knowledge, history, and culture.