Glasgow Zine Library
Self-publishing library, archive, and community space, Govanhill, Glasgow, Scotland, U.K.
Re-Flecting
GZL’s Reading List
I was lucky enough to meet with Chris in April this year to discuss the project, print culture, zines, and the library itself. What followed felt less like a formal interview and more like an extended conversation around care, access, cultural participation, and the possibilities of organising differently.
What struck me immediately throughout our conversation was the extent to which Chris framed the library in opposition to dominant institutional and commercial models. Early on, he reflected on internal conversations around programming and the pressure many cultural spaces feel to pursue commercially successful events:
"There was a conversation about like, should we be doing stuff that's like a guaranteed smash hit? [...] or should we programme stuff that we think is like interesting and relevant and useful? And obviously the answer is the second one."
This distinction felt central not only to the library's ethos, but also the wider concerns of this research. The value of programming here is not measured through profitability, audience metrics, or spectacle, but through usefulness, care, relevance, and participation. Chris repeatedly described the library as operating on "the opposite ground" of what people might expect a cultural organisation to be.
"Everything here is free, including events [...] the facilitators get paid, and there's provisions for everyone who comes in to have a cup of tea and a biscuit [...] if people need access in place for these things as well, that's also provided."
What interested me most was the way these forms of care were not framed as supplementary to the cultural programme, but as part of the programme itself. Hospitality, accessibility, and participation are embedded in the infrastructure of the space.
The exhibition or workshop is not the singular outcome; rather, the conditions surrounding participation become equally significant. This felt closely connected to RE as methodology through its emphasis on restructuring and reimaginging institutional value systems. Chris described this approach not as a compromise, but as an active inversion of expectation:
"It's not even a middle ground, it's the other ground. It's the opposite ground where we don't really have to worry about that yet."
Much of our discussion on how the library's programming emerges directly through community engagement and listening. Chris described programming not as something imposed onto audiences, but something developed relationally through conversation, observation, and responsiveness:
"In a practical sense by asking them [...] Everyone just gets asked like, did you enjoy your experience?"
Alongside direct feedback, Chris also described the importance of paying attention to who enters the space and what communities are already forming around it:
“We also just take a look at who is coming in as well, even if they’re not telling us anything.”
What emerges here is a curatorial methodology grounded in attentiveness rather than authority. Programming becomes iterative and relational, shaped through ongoing encounters with communities rather than predetermined institutional agendas. Chris described moments where events seemed to emerge almost intuitively from audience interests, recalling:
“We’ve literally just been able to pluck something out of the sky that just completely meshed with what they’re doing.”
At the same time, he acknowledges that developing audiences requires far more deliberate forms of outreach and trust-building. Reflecting on how people who may not already feel entitled to cultural spaces are encouraged to participate. He explained:
“You have to meet them where they are. [...] You have to go out and be like, prove what the point of this is.”
I found this particularly significant in relation to access. The conversation made clear that accessibility is not simply logistical or financial; it is emotional, social, and relational. Making events free does not automatically dismantle barriers if people still do not feel culturally welcomed into a space. Chris spoke about the importance of building relationships through existing community networks, support groups, and organisations:
"The relationship building starts in a sort of inter-group sense."
This understanding of participation as something built slowly through trust felt especially important. It reframed outreach not as audience development in a marketing sense, but as a form of sustained relational labour.
As the conversation progressed, Chris became increasingly reflective about the wider social role spaces like Glasgow Zine Library are being asked to fulfil. Discussing the organisation's growth and the communities drawn toward it, he remarked:
“I think our existence and our growth is a sign of a potentially quite sick society in a way.”
He went on to describe the increasing expectation placed on small grassroots organisations to address isolation, provide cultural enrichment, and create forms of belonging often absent elsewhere:
"Should they be the role of a small charity?"
This was one of the moments in the conversation that unsettled me the most. Throughout this research, I have repeatedly encountered cultural space being asked to compensate for broader structural failures produced through austerity, privatisation, and institutional withdrawal. Community, well-being, and "combating isolation" become funding objectives, while the conditions producing those crises remain largely untouched. Chris spoke candidly about the strain this creates:
"We're all part time workers [...] this is not that role."
Yet, despite these realities, there was also a persistent refusal to allow precarity to limit the organisation's ambitions. Reflecting on the risks involved in sustaining the space, Chris explained:
“We’ve always just gone and done the thing as if we had endless amounts of time money because you have to.”
I found this statement particularly resonant. It suggests that alternative cultural infrastructures often survive not through certainty or stability, but through acts of collective imagination and persistence. There is a deliberate refusal to shrink the possibility in anticipation of scarcity.
Toward the end of our conversation, Chris reflected on the nature of the discussion itself. He explained that our exchange felt different from other conversations in that I seemed "morally invested in the topic." This stayed with me afterwards, it made me more aware of my own position within the research process. I am not approaching these conversations as a neutral observer. My own investments in access, collective knowledge, print culture, and institutional critique inevitably shape both the questions I ask and the ways I interpret responses. In this sense, the conversation itself became reflective of RE as methodology: a recursive process of listening, recognition, and re-evaluation.
Leaving the library, I found myself thinking less about zines as objects and more about the infrastructures surrounding them. What Glasgow Zine Library demonstrates is that curatorial practice can operate through hospitality, relation, responsiveness, and care as much as through exhibitions or programming. RE emerges here not as a fixed framework, but as an ongoing process of rethinking value, rebuilding trust, and reorganising cultural participation around collective rather than transactional principles.