What can we learn today from the practices and articulations of independent publishing in Switzerland since the late 1950s? What creative impulses do such materials generate today? What can we learn from earlier articulations of counter-publicity in the age of seemingly unlimited digital publishing possibilities? Where do we connect today with issues negotiated in the past? And where do production traditions extend into our immediate present?
These are just some of the questions that led to the creation of the "Archive of Swiss Independent Periodical Publishing" (ASIPP) in 2019. It brings together independent serial publishing projects since the 1950s, with a focus on Switzerland. It emerged from the collaboration "wir publizieren" [link] between the Hochschule für Künste Bremen (HfK) and the Hochschule der Künste Bern (HKB), where ASIPP began. Since 2023 it is located at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Here you will find magazines, newspapers or journals of the alternative, autonomous, young, designers, artists, activists and cultural workers of all stripes. They are all passionate about finding ways to express, produce and distribute content without professional filters.
Alternative press
Taken together, these are representative testimonies of a Swiss counter-public that gained in importance as an alternative press throughout the West, particularly from the late 1960s onwards. And they are also preserved in other places, which is why the ASIPP, together with the related collections ‘Archive of Independent Publishing AIP’ at the HfK Bremen and the ‘Archiv für Alternativkultur’ at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University Berlin, has founded the ‘International Network of Independent Publishing Archives’.
The ASIPP collection focuses on serial Swiss publications, whereby a somewhat shifted chronology can be observed in this country compared to the rest of Europe. In the field of independent publishing in Switzerland, 1980 only really represents ‘68’ elsewhere, even though highly exciting alternative serial publications were already appearing in many places throughout the 1970s. A large part of the holdings is politically charged: primary source material can be used here to trace how the concept of counter-publicity began to emerge in Switzerland at a time when views on society and politics, as perceived by a broad public, were supported and significantly influenced by an established media landscape. Marginalised groups, different views and assessments, new topics and priorities were articulated accordingly as a protest movement via the tried and tested means of demonstrations – and as an alternative movement increasingly via media that ranged from leaflets to the alternative press and terrestrial pirate radio stations.
Autonomous publishing
All of this is not only evidence of the emergence of a counter-public sphere, but also of a counter-culture that drives it, a culture that gave rise to many of the publications collected here, which were created with a great deal of passion. In this context, forms of collaborative autonomous publishing emerged in a wide range of political, economic and social (protest) movements. Within these, not only were topics discussed and content prepared, but media were also produced and distributed independently. A new, distinct press landscape of independent magazines, city magazines and alternative newspapers emerged, which bears witness to the need for different information on the part of both producers and consumers.
This historical cosmos of the ASIPP is based at the ZHdK within the Department of Cultural Analysis and Education (DKV) and is currently housed in a temporary DKV research project room at Konradstrasse 72 in Zurich. The ASIPP sees itself as a place that is open to the public as far as possible – but in particular, the material is directly available for research and teaching in the fields of cultural critique, design and publishing. Thus, the ASIPP's holdings currently serve a growing interest in teaching, in particular, in the collected content, its underlying forms and environments, as well as an interest in design and visual appearance. Under what were often at best semi-professional production conditions, the content had to develop its own visual languages, but on the other hand, it also allowed graphic designers the greatest possible creative freedom.
Information and knowledge store
A glance at the ZHdK courses for 2024/25 shows how valuable this is in the here and now: a keyword search for ‘publishing’ yields a good dozen hits in the Departments of Design, Fine Arts and Cultural Analysis and Education. Here, beyond the practice of being an artist, designer or mediator, questions of self-determined journalistic articulation are addressed in a wide variety of ways. Students are once again increasingly interested in identifying which exclusion mechanisms can still be found today between the ‘ruling’ public and the counter-public, and which groups are unable to find a platform at precisely which point. And they are learning to what extent today's uncontrollable journalistic forms and formats, which manifest themselves in destructive misinformation, assertion, deception and outrage, but also in hatred and incitement to violence, and which are formulated by new, completely different marginalised groups, stand on the shoulders of politically very different movements and their publications.
Not all of them use the ASIPP for this, but there they can work on these questions not only with the holdings, but also hands-on with them. In an archive that defines itself as ‘use me’ and that can only exist in a university of the arts. In this way, the ASIPP sees itself as a store of information and knowledge in the Foucauldian sense, beyond its physical holdings – as a store not only of printed material from the past 70 years or so, but also as a store of the underlying and inherent practices of targeted cooperation, collaboration, editing and alternative forms of (knowledge) production. The ASIPP offers, also in reference to Foucault, a basis for formulating and transforming statements and thereby not only to update material, but also to generate new knowledge about the objects and their availability and negotiability in discourse.
The ASIPP website presents itself digitally as an introduction, collection, overview and catalogue, as well as a documentation of events and happenings. As an archive without any commercial interest, the ASIPP saves and preserves historical sources that would otherwise be in danger of being forgotten and would not infrequently be consigned to the waste paper collection out of simple ignorance or low esteem. The ASSIP processes this material, preserves it and makes it available – and invites you, on site and on the web, to browse, to make additional contributions and comments... and, of course, to take a look at your own holdings and then be happy to entrust them to the archive. Donations or deposits are welcome!