Not yet seen is a remixed version of Henry David Thoreau’s influential essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. In the zine I combine Thoreau’s text and my own illustrations. Not yet seen was created during the Zineton 2020 challenge in September 2020. This was the first time the challenge was held and different themes were randomly assigned to the participants. I got Elokapina’s (Extinction Rebellion Finland) theme “Civil Disobedience”, which I was very happy about!
We had a weekend to create our zines and we got our themes on a Friday. I knew I’d want to spent most of the weekend working on the illustrations, so it’d suit me well to work with already finished text. I ended up choosing Thoreau’s essay, as it has been on the public domain for some time already and it fitted the theme perfectly. I updated the text a little bit (for an example, I got rid of gender-specific pronouns), edited it, cut it up and finally laid it next to my own, storybook like illustrations.
The finished zine was presented as part of the Zineton 2020 -gala with the other zines created during the challenge. For my delight, my zine got one of the special mentioned awarded by Elokapina! The challenge itself was a great experience and I hope to take part again in the upcoming years.
A philosophical piece that challenged the reader and invited to ponder very big questions. A lot to think about amid calming and beautiful illustrations. Thoreau’s essay is several hundred years old and still relevant, and the text came alive and fit into the modern context of 2020 through this zine.
