Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Drawing on collaborative participation in an printing project, I explore my evolving participation from audience to co-creator across nine issues, revealing methodological possibilities for accessing creative processes, making visible the messy, deeply social negotiations behind artistic production.

Paper long abstract

Creative processes are often treated as solitary, highly personal, and even private. As subjectivity in action, drawing together materialities, embodied craft, personal imagination, and deeply social interconnections, creative processes are insightful sites for anthropological study. Yet accessing creative processes can be methodologically challenging. This paper considers collaborative co-production of artworks, specifically artistic printmaking and zines, as affording insights into the complexities of arts practice.

During year-long fieldwork at an Icelandic co-working space of 250 creatives, I became unexpectedly and increasingly embedded in the production of a multimodal zine series. Beginning as an audience member at the launch of issue 1, my involvement deepened across nine issues: contributor, volunteer, co-producer, and co-leader. Each issue included social design principles of democratic decision-making, multimodal arts practices, and experimental uses of materiality. The culmination was the development of my own project—a zine of ethnographic fiction and art—produced in collaboration with 10 other participants.

My shifting participation fundamentally altered what became observable and what counted as ethnographic evidence. As an audience member I encountered a finished object. Behind this product, though, was a whole series of deeply social, often messy processes of negotiation, conflict, problem-solving, relationality, and reciprocity. Collaborative participation in this project revealed creativity not as isolated inspiration but as collaborative sense-making—a process of finding order in chaos through traceable negotiations, material iterations, and collective problem-solving that made visible the deeply social dynamics of artistic production.