In this article, I reflect on zine-making as a creative research practice for tracing memories in and of public libraries. These reflections draw on a collaborative project I developed with two local zine artists at the Central Library of Bremen, Germany. Together, we organised two open workspaces in 2024, inviting library visitors to create zines that capture their memories of libraries. The resulting collection, distributed in early 2025, forms both the empirical material and the methodological focus of this essay. Rather than treating zines as representations of memory, I understand them as a practice that can generate, mediate and spatialise memory. Through five examples, I explore how zine-making brings into view the sensory, emotional and everyday dimensions of library experience, how it surfaces intimate and biographical narratives and how it foregrounds the fragmented, layered and often ambiguous character of memories. Zines, as both method and outcome, emerge here as a way of attending to the lived and felt ways in which libraries are remembered and made meaningful. As a research practice, I suggest that zine-making can redistribute authorship, invite multimodal expression and shape the forms through which memories become knowable. In doing so, this article ties in with discussions on creative methods in cultural geography by asking what kinds of knowledges such practices enable and how they inform imaginaries of public spaces, such as libraries, as lived and remembered settings.
Melike Peterson (Fri,) studied this question.