Balkan Beats 32
The DIY by Alessandro Pantorno
A short story of the birth of the DIY and five useful tips. 1. Customise or create your clothes:
The DIY stands for “do it yourself’; it was born within the punk culture in the late 70s, promoting a particular form of protest able to create a sub-alternative way of communication, production, and independence from a capitalistic system.
Instead of buying new clothes, you can recycle your own old/ugly/broken ones, to create new ones. You can also create some useful objects like a bag or a blanket. The only thing you need to know is how to use a sewing machine, that is pretty easy! I advise you to follow DEPOP, a website where you might find inspiration.
This method of auto production was first used
2. Create a “fanzine”:
by punk-bands like Buzzcocks who created their label to be independent of industrial marketing.
If you’re an artist, a photographer, or a content creator looking for visibility, you can create your Another essential tool in that period was the own fanzine that can be both digital and printed birth of the fanzine, a magazine created by peo- to distribute everywhere! ple with no budget. The magazine was in an A-4 To create it: format, mostly written by hand, largely talking about music scenes, as it was written by punk -In photoshop open a new layer and be sure it is fans (hence the term fan-zine), that allowed horizontally. bands from different countries to get to know each other. -Divide the layer in two with a ruler so as to have the first page on the left and the last page on the The fanzine evolved very quickly since it’s incep- right. tion in the ’70s and took many forms of expression by including topics like art and politics. Nowadays the spirit of DIY evolved in diverse
ways. By browsing on youtube you can find a lot of tutorials on how to create basically any object.
In essence, the idea of the DIY encourages the discovery of personal creative spaces, independence, and trust in inventive and handcraft. For this reason, I give you 5 tips to start some
DIY projects:
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© mon magan
