S4, E9 FIKA book and zine

FIKA book and zine is a collective of photographers who collaborate on book and zine projects. The founding members are Arun Misra, Frankie McAllister and Joanne Furniss. We talk about how the group was formed and how they support each other on their projects, whether personal or as a group. Arun, Frankie and Joanna are members of London Independent Photography. The episode was recorded on the 24 October 2024.

Instagram: @fikabookandzine

London Independent Photography
Website: www.londonphotography.org.uk

Podcast details:
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Website: www.artiststales.net
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Transcript

Welcome to Artist Tales, the podcast that features and celebrates artists from different walks of life. I'm your host, Heather Martin, and in this episode, I'm speaking with Arun Misra, Frankie McAllister, and Joanna Furniss, who are the founding members of FICA, Book and Zine. Welcome all of you. Hi, Heather.

Hi, Heather.  Hi, Heather. It's good to have you all on this episode. So before we get on to speaking about FIKA, could you just individually tell me a little bit about yourselves and what you do artistically? So if I start with you, Arun. My background, um, my training is, is as an engineer and I suppose that training somehow seeps, finds its way into some of the works I do, you know, I think quite a subtle way.

So I had my first camera in 1968 and this is the period when there was a space age space race and the first sort of a manned program to the moon Apollo 11 1968 69 I think it was. So that was happening around the time when I had my first camera and I was watching TV and all the news. So,  and I'm sure somehow that has influenced what I do.

I'm very attracted, before even photography, to sort of painting, sculpture, and in fact for a while I was, I did ceramic arts, I was actually making sculptures from pottery. So the kind of artists, I know you might really ask this a little later, but the kind of artists that have sort of influenced my visual sort of aesthetics, if you like, are people like Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko from the Abstract Expressionist, uh, movements, Barbara Hepworth and Picasso, both from the sculpture and the way that they use shapes.

So in a way that's my way of background. I think you'll Last part of the question is what do I do? Um, at the moment with FIKA I'm actually making and really enjoying making photo books and magazines, but my first photo book was done as part of my MA in photography arts about three, four years ago, and the book from my MA project was called Transience.

And it does weave through all of the things that I've said in terms of what's influenced me, but Transience is really about the human journey from way back to where we are now in metaphorical sort of terms. So it uses ideas of development of language, development of mathematics, conception. So I think I'll stop because I'll keep on rambling otherwise, but that hopefully gives you a flavor of where I come from.

Thanks, Arun. And I'll just turn to you, Joanna. Could you just tell us a bit about yourself as an artist and what you do creatively? Sure. Well, I suppose I began photographing more, in a more focused way, around 12 years ago now. I was interested in storytelling through images, and so I'd started to make a few projects based on place and space, as I was realising.

Often very attracted to places that are undergoing transition. And I found myself sort of going back and keeping up to date with how those places were changing and evolving. So based on that, I decided to pursue some short courses in documentary photography. So storytelling through images, and I did those at the City Lit.

So that sparked my interest in in doing a bit more, which also prepared me to get out for my MA in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism. And that's actually where I first encountered Aaron. I always forget this, Aaron. We met doing our MAs and we did. We even sat next to each other a few times in the lecture theatre.

We did.  So, uh, we, we, um, encountered one another. when we were both doing our MAs. So the MA itself that actually went off in, I went into quite a different direction. I didn't end up doing sort of straight photo journalism and documentary photography. I actually found that my work sort of ended up going in quite a different direction, which I don't really want to label.

And I think, you know, sometimes we're quite keen to label our work, but I try not to label mine and I'm more comfortable with not labeling it because I'm not always too sure how to describe it. But what I found was I really enjoyed making what I Work and realizing work in book form as well. So similarly to obviously Frankie and Aaron, I like bookmaking sequencing and uh, that's how I realized a lot of my projects when I was doing my ma and that's what I'm also doing now.

I'm focusing more on producing a few zines and things and some booklets, trying to get things off my hard drive using what I've got to work with right now because.  I really have some projects that have been desperate to get off of that hard drive. And I think we all have those problems from time to time, it becomes very frustrating.

So I've decided not to make any new work until I've actually figured out these projects and sequenced and created and produced them in some way, shape or form. And, and that's also another good thing of working with FIKA because we all support each other in that respect. Try and get things out there and share them.

So I appreciate that. So that's me creatively. Other things, I've moved around quite a lot over the past 12 months. So I have been in transit and some of the work that I'm realizing right now is sort of based on those experiences. Three or four months living in a certain place and another three or four months living in another place.

So I did photograph whilst I was in all of those places. And, uh,  So the themes there are sort of based on my sort of transit as I work through those places and also the transitions that I'm going through myself. So that's the kind of work that I'm working on at the moment and looking to create a few zines out of those experiences.

So, oh, and drawing as well. I was in Margate, started doodling and drawing, ended up drawing just very simple pen drawings. Some of the images that I'd taken, so that really slowed things down as well, which is often opposite to clicking away with my digital camera. So a bit of drawing, and I tried out some darkroom stuff too, which was also a nice way to slow things down.

And I think that's also influenced why I'm sort of resisting taking a lot more pictures at the moment too. I just want to slow it down a bit and create with what I have. Finally, but not least, Frankie.  Over to you. A bit like Joe, really, I guess I started seriously taking photographs about 10 to 15 years ago, and it was because I started travelling, and then I was travelling to all these amazing, amazing places, and having fantastic experiences, and not being able to do them justice at all with my photography.

So, I had to go back to the drawing board and relearn all the technicals, and start to develop, partly with lockdown and other things. As the traveling declined, I had to start thinking about what were my real core interests and what really motivated me. So I'm principally a landscape photographer, but more and more I'm finding that that's a little unsatisfactory.

And I've, especially with the development of creating books, I've been able to allow my other interests to kind of direct my photography. So rather than doing single images, I like to do projects and series and develop a theme or a story. For more information visit www. FEMA. gov And my particular interests are things like politics and the impact of man on landscape, geopolitics, and that kind of thing.

Cause and effect, really. And so I like to explore that in the books, one way or another, both through representational imagery and also more impressionist imagery, which sometimes I find more appropriate for landscape photography. The bookmaking and the inception of FIKA has been fantastic in that because as well as being able to share ideas, just the consolidation of the bookmaking practice has just been great, really, because there's always so many projects knocking around in our heads so many ideas to think that you can make something tangible from them. 

And related to that as well there are other types of media I also like to explore. I like the idea of printmaking and doing things to make your work completely unique. So if you make a book you can do a cover that has got a drawing or a painting or a print that you've made on it as well. So there's no way that's reproducible  by anybody else.

So those are all the elements I'm interested in at the moment and, and the background. And that leads quite nicely into my next question around how did it become about and what is it? Well, we all knew each other a little through an LIP, London Independent Photography. We all belonged to different groups, but we all met from time to time.

Aaron and I worked on an exhibition for one of the groups that we belonged to. So we did get to know each other and I think we were all at that stage where we were wanting to develop a different phase of our photography and we were becoming interested in the idea of the bookmaking, the creation of series, the creation of tangible things.

And so it was just by chance conversations We realized we had a common, shared interest and we decided to explore it and see if we could do something as a collective, with the view that a collective is always in a way greater than the sum of its parts. It gives you a little bit of clout, a little bit of weight when you're trying to do something, if you're trying to promote yourself or whatever.

To say you represent a group somehow seems easier than to just act on your own behalf, really. So from my point of view, that's pretty much how it was, but. Is there anything else from Arun or Joanna that you'd like to add? I suppose the one thing that might be nice to add is why we're called FIKA. When we had our initial meetings, we were, we were meeting up in places like the photographer's gallery and drinking quite a bit of coffee and cake, eating cake as well.

And, uh, so the name FIKA actually means to, to have coffee, to meet and have coffee. And I think it implies like it in a sociable sense as well. So it seemed appropriate. to call our collective fika because we do tend to meet and drink coffee when we're discussing things, trying not to spill coffee on our books and various things that we're trying to make.

It gives me the image of coffee houses, you know, whenever coffee houses were about, you know, what, 200, 200 years ago, you're in a coffee house, talk, not talking politics necessarily, Maybe you are, but it, you know, there's kind of a, that sense of doing something while having coffee, the exchange of ideas and all of that kind of thing.

Yes. Yeah. I know what you mean. Getting hyper on the caffeine as well.  I would like to just sort of add to all of that because, um, what Jo just said about sort of, uh, sort of the developing our first idea. Well, that's why we called ourselves FICA. But I think there's more sort of. depth to how we decided certain things, which actually have helped create the bond between the three of us.

So yeah, we had spent a lot of time, you know, discussing things over coffee. And I think early on, there's a lot of respect for each other and the ethos. We somehow knew that, you know, there's a kind of shared ethos and whatever we did, I think that ethos would have been there and that helped. But when it came to deciding what we're going to call ourselves, And when it came to deciding what project we're going to do, because someone else asked me this question, how do you, you know, how this project came about?

And my answer was actually, it didn't come out because somebody said, oh, let's do Silence and Light, or let's call ourselves FIKA. We asked ourselves the question, what should we call ourselves? And then there was a discussion, quite a long one. And what project shall we work on? I think we had about six, seven different ideas.

And it wasn't as if, you know, a vote, a majority vote said that we'll do this. It just evolved. And then we all knew this is a project that we want to do. And similarly, we all knew that we want to call ourselves FICA. So that process is quite difficult to sort of write down, you know, in specific terms, how do you do that?

But whatever it was, it worked. And I think that comes back to  the ethos thing and the ego with that as well. Because if the ego is put back, you know, left outside, you can have that kind of discussion. If they're not, there's somebody who wanting to push their particular idea ahead of others. And I think that's really quite, I feel that's quite important to where we are now.

I agree. And is the plan, I guess this perhaps this may be part of the purpose of FICA, but is the plan to kind of have your own individual projects and then a group project, or is it almost like a network, you know, of you three to kind of support each other's projects or, yeah, I guess it's the purpose what, you know, it sounds like it's a bit of a platform for sharing ideas, but is the purpose to produce something at the end of it or is it just to support the different projects that you're working on?

I think it's very much to produce something at the end of it. We enjoy our discussions and we can get as esoteric as we like and really enjoy that. But the object is always to actually create something, something physical at the end of it. So we will always work on a joint project, I think, maybe one a year or perhaps more if we're able to, but also use it as a platform for our own individual projects.

So it's, it's very much the, for both those things, but very much about the realization of those ideas as well. And that's something that the, um, you really, where you really feel the benefit of having. three people talking about things rather than everything being left to whatever's in your own head and your own energy and motivation.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it sounds like quite an egalitarian group. You know, I don't get a sense of one person's a particular, you know, let's go in this direction or leader. It's kind of a built on consensus.  Yeah, yeah, very much so. Absolutely. Yeah.  Yeah, and I think we all bring different sorts of strengths as well and experiences to the group, which really helps when we're trying to push towards the same outcome as well.

So that's been really good, really helpful. The consensus has been something that's evolved quite naturally. So it's not that we've ever had to sit down and say, okay, if two people out of three of us want this, then we'll go with it. It is literally been discussion has allowed us all to arrive at the same decision.

as opposed to having to really look on it as something that we have to actually divide up and vote on almost. And partly that's a result of our being only three people. It may be more difficult later on if we have other people join us, which would probably be a long term intention. It may get a bit more structured then, but for now it's all, it all happens actually very naturally and organically, which is quite nice, I think.

So what different skills or things do you bring to FICA that kind of support the FICA and also the three of you? I think what I was reflecting on was a recent experience which you might talk about shortly in terms of when things might not go the way that you planned and that often my initial mindset would be to sort of panic a bit and and get quite anxious if things aren't going my way and, uh, Sort of getting a bit of a state about how to resolve an issue.

And then what I found for, you know, obviously I don't do that all of the time in life because you'd never get anything done, but working with Frankie Narin I find that it's been really good to be able to sort of share some similar frustrations and how other people would have different approaches to dealing with those challenges and rather than act on your own, so rather than me sort of freak out and go crazy at a certain supplier, for example, which makes me sound like a diva, I'm really not, but we've had our, uh, all different sorts of emotions have been impacted by recent, recent, um, FIKA projects.

Which again, we'll talk about shortly, but um, Frankie brings a calmness and a very sort of democratic approach to dealing with things and Aaron's great on the phone and will sort of chase things up in a very direct and polite way. That's been really, really helpful. And uh, you know, then we will get back together and reassess where we are before we have our next sort of action or response to an email, for example.

So yeah, just different personalities as well, coming together and working well together. Yeah, could I say something to that? I mean, I think, absolutely, about personal challenges. Now, just like what Joe said or alluded to, so we have these challenges that come up in our personal projects as well as the joint projects that we do.

So I remember a few months ago when Frankie was finishing her Dividing Lines project. And Frankie, I hope you don't mind me saying this. I don't. Yeah, you don't. So, she would have basically shred, almost, she was thinking of shredding the print run of the book. But we had a chat, uh, about that, quite a long one actually, didn't we?

We probably spent most of the meeting about that, Frankie don't do it, kind of thing. As it is, Frankie didn't do it, and the books are out there, and they've been well received, well reviewed. So, it's having that opportunity and a group of trusted people that you can talk to. And if it was, I'm sure Jo, if it was really rubbish we would have said so.

That's true, yes. But it wasn't. It's 95, 95, 98 percent there. So do you sort of take that rash decision just because of that 3%? Because we actually have pretty much higher standards of ourselves.  And we create a rod for ourselves sometimes. I think that's really true actually, Aaron. So I just wanted to say that, because that actually is a huge help.

It is, yeah. And Frankie, do you have any, anything to add? Well, I would agree with that. And certainly the particular instance Aaron's referring to, I was absolutely on the floor when I first received my books, because they weren't quite as I imagined. And it was absolutely critical to have people who knew what I was talking about.

It wasn't just they were strangers. Like, my husband would have said, Oh, they're fine. And that would have meant absolutely nothing, because he wouldn't know. He wouldn't have the critical eye. So it was very important to have people who knew what what my process had been, who knew what I was trying to do, who knew about the whole situation, to actually be supportive right at that time.

And in, in general, going through the process we've been through recently, a very difficult print process again. You have different energies at different times. There's, there's always a point when you might give up, or a point where you're really angry, or a point where you're pushy, and it's really great to have three people who are at different stages at different times.

So you can, you can keep each other on an even keel instead of it going through peaks and troughs the whole time. So it's very helpful. And just throughout the course of the year, there are times when you're motivated and you can drive things on, times when you're busy or distracted by personal life. And it's great that it's never going to be all three of us at the same time, have the same stuff going on, so we can always, always kind of smooth over that and, and keep going. 

So, yeah, you've, you have answered one of my questions about some of the challenges you face. So it sounds like things around print runs or kind of getting projects off the line. Would there be any other kind of challenges you faced as a group? You know, cause I do sense you're, you know, you're fairly new in terms of coming together.

I guess just working out how we work really, how, who does what, and, um, what we want and what space we give each other, and literally working out a three way relationship. So that's, I suppose that's, it's not a challenge in the sense that it's difficult, but it is something that does happen. It's not, it's not a given that everything will work out, you know, so.

Aaron or Joanna, do you have anything else to add to that or? No, I think that's that, that covers it. I mean, um, there are some other sort of challenges we've had, but they're kind of very technical in nature and easily resolved. So, you know, design challenges, you know, in terms of how to design the book. So we've got in the expertise to help us with that.

So I suppose in that there's a kind of ability to recognize that we have an issue because we don't have a particular skill set. And I think that in itself is something I think to be, um, comfortable about that, that we can do that. We can say, okay, we don't have this. We don't know how to deal with this.

Let's, let's seek advice. So, and I think there will be future challenges of maybe different nature. And I will come back to something later on, which will probably help in dealing with difficult future challenges, because as we get into our second project or third project, and these challenges may come from things like.

In a sensitive, I'm trying to express this in a way that, you know, works very personal. So when you look for feedback and critique, not everybody's ready for it and at the same level. So if you're around the table and you're critiquing, so you've been asked to critique someone's work, how do you sense how far you go?

If you're sort of, uh, uh, starting from a point of view that you want to give an honest, professional and sensitive feedback. So do you back off? Do you carry on? You know? So I think we know each other relatively well enough to sense all of that. But do you say, actually, this is not good enough right now, it needs a bit more work?

So I think those are kind of future challenges that may happen or may not happen. And especially if we grow, we get sort of, you know, another member or another two members. And I think those kind of challenges are the type that can change the dynamics of a collective or a group of people working together.

But that's for the future. In terms of challenges, they're often the things that we have less control over. So when it comes to printing, for example, and knowing that we've got things to do. write our end as far as we possibly can and then just sending things off into the ether. We never know how things are going to come out, where, how the print run is going to go, for example.

So those kinds of challenges I would have added to some of the feekers that we face. You've covered quite well the challenges that you face and potentially face in the future, which is quite interesting. Would you be able to maybe talk about who or what has influenced your work? I mean, you've talked about what you're bringing to the table when it comes to FICA and the support that you give each other.

But would there be other kind of external things that might influence kind of a group project or your personal projects? Maybe, Frankie, I'll start with you on this one. Well, we actually had a bit of a discussion about this, and spontaneously we came up with more or less a similar view, that when it comes to the creative side of things, nothing from outside really does influence us, because we're, we're all dealing with a number of ideas and projects that we've had on our mind for a while.

We're sharing them with each other. Probably we have as more influence over each other in the slight bending of direction and things like that over the projects, you know, rather than having any external influence. And so for me personally, the only influence might be in relation to kind of operationally as a, as a, a new collective, seeing how other small collectives, independent organizations run.

So I look at things like the photo book collective and setups like that. Just for ideas about how things might develop in the future, but, um, creatively, no, it's really, really strange. I'm sure there are influences that just kind of seep in from, you know, unconsciously, but consciously, no, really just the three of us at the moment, weirdly.

And just to add, I think another thing we discussed is that we don't, it's more or less the same as what you're saying Frankie, but we don't want to make work that people would expect to see. We don't want to sort of fulfill a criteria. We just want to do what we're just kind of passionate about as a group.

So yeah, just wanted to add that. Yeah, and I think that's a quite a strong feeling in the sense that we, and this is my words now, so we maybe actively resist being influenced by fashions and trends. So, you know, a few years ago there's a kind of generally, there's a trend in photographic aesthetics everything to be flushed out, you know, in magazines like the British Journal of Photography and a lot of the pictures were just sort of faded and they were kind of pastel colors.

So it's that sort of resisting sort of, it's not, it's not because we don't, we dislike it, but it's actually not being influenced by those sort of things and being true to what we want to do ourselves. And if that means a particular aesthetic, then yeah, we'll use it if it helps the work, but we're not going to use it just because, you know, it's being promoted by the competitions or by magazines elsewhere.

So it sounds like the focus is the work and what you're trying to say rather than the aesthetic. Yes.  So it does bring me nicely to my last question in terms of kind of what's next at any upcoming projects as either as a group or individually. Maybe if I start with Joanna. Well, individually, just coming back to some of the projects I've done.

I mentioned previously around some zine and bookmaking, getting those projects off my hard drive and, uh, realizing those in book form and maybe not just zines. Again, this is good to sharing with the group. Frankie suggested producing a book in a certain way so I can open it out flat to make the most of the images.

And, uh, so that was another, a good thing that came out one of our FIKA meetings recently. So some new book projects and for FIKA we will be having a launch soon, I guess. officially of our first project, which will be Silence and Light, and we'll be making those available at the Lipp Book Fair, which is on the 23rd of November, 2024.

That will be, uh, when our first project, our joint project, our first FIKA project, which is Silence and Light, will be available to display and available for purchase as well. I have a couple of projects that partly arose out of the last major project, my Dividing Lines project, because of going back to visit Ireland.

I've got a zine that I'm working on called Flashbacks, which is taking pictures of the way things are now in the areas I used to live in or visit. and relating them to flashbacks of particular events that happened back in the 70s, during the worst sorts of times of the Troubles, really, when I lived there previously.

So that's one thing, and I wanted to be a zine, not um, because it's about the content rather than the aesthetic. And I have another project, which was a series of images and poetry that I developed probably five or six years ago, but I could never think of a way of doing anything with them. There was never going to be an exhibition, I just couldn't think of an outlet, but now, again, the books have given that opportunity, so it will become a book, possibly a handmade book.

And there are a couple of other things in the pipeline as well, because it just feels like a whole world has opened up with the ability to actually create a series yourself onto your own steam without waiting for anybody else to say you can, or you should, or why don't you. And you can get it printed yourself and, you know, it's fantastic, your own personal exhibition.

And then with FIKA, we're just starting to talk tentatively about our  next project, the one after the one that's about to launch. So that's going to be exciting too. We've learned so much in this first one. Yes.  That it might be a bit easier or we might pick a simpler route.  Yeah, so my sort of three personal projects and, uh, are where, you know, the photographs are there, like what Joe said, these are on the hard drive, I need to sort of get them off somehow.

But I suspect it's going to take quite a while, because all the other things get in the way. One of the challenges is balancing work, you know, work,  your day job with the photography, so. That's a, that's a constant challenge. But yeah, I have three. The one that's nearest to completion is a very personal project called 1978.

Now, Frankie has seen that in draft and sort of given me critique. And Joe, when we meet, I'm going to show you that as well. But this is ready now, almost to for the final edit and go to, um, first draft print. And these are pictures from about 1978 when Poonam, my wife, and I first met. So they're a few, few pictures, but interspersed with the environment at the time, because this is in the spring and the summer.

So this is like, you know, Paris, pictures of Paris or Cardiff where we met. and the flora and fauna. So it's a kind of, a few images of us, but other images of other things that are going on at that time. I would describe it as a quite an arty type of project. So it's not, I don't know how else to describe it, it'll be that.

Someone else who I showed it to said that this is a love letter, isn't it Arun?  So let's see. It is a very sweet book and it is actually a love letter, definitely, to a time and a person. The two other, which is sort of the big, big ones or that, uh, have been not only in my hard drive, but also in my editing table on and off.

So what is I've called forever. And this is using a decaying house in India. It's quite a, a vernacular kind of architecture. It's very common as a metaphor for life. So I'm using the cracks and the, and the decaying process that, that a building is a domestic building experiences over time with the aging of the person living in them.

So, I don't think Frankie and Jo have seen any images from this, or have you? I can't remember. I don't think so. Have you? I don't think so. No. It just hasn't got to that stage. All the images are there at the moment I'm trying to sequence them. So I'm hoping that they'll have something to show on this one by the end of the year or early in January, at least a storyboard.

But we're talking about sort of, uh, between 80 and 100 edited images that sort of, uh, go through. And again, these are quite so conceptual and thematic. So you're looking at sort of youth and vibrance and then spirituality and sort of meditation and then things like that, that one would go through in their life in a span of life, you know, and the slowing down of the body kind of thing.

But there's very little human figures in this. There'll be very little of the person actually lives in the house. You might see one or two, three. pictures of them, but it's the surroundings, it's the evidence of that person through the other images. So that's why I'm working on this. For me, that's quite, this is quite a, an important and a complex project.

And the other one, which is I think even more complex, but the images are there, is really looking at, and I haven't got a working title, but it's about madness and power. And ego and how that all of this can lead to destruction. So that's what it is, the human condition in which madness just can overtake a society.

And these are at the moment quite abstract images. What I'm trying to do first with this one is to write a story. You actually write the text for the project. and then assemble the images afterwards. And it comes from a saying or an idea which sort of stuck in my head, you know, when I was talking to my Upanum.

And I don't know where this quotation comes from, but it runs along this line that those that God wants to destroy makes mad first. That's really stuck in me. You know, the whole idea that kind of the divine madness and ego completely takes over and you have the power to do what you like, eventually it will lead to your downfall at some point.

So that's the idea. It's a challenge to assemble the pictures, which I'm really through at the moment. It's a real challenge. And I've had a lot of conversations with many people, and I think the step for me, next step, is to actually write, write an essay on this first, and then start to assemble the images.

But the images, a lot of the images are there, and I took them before the concept, so it'll be quite interesting to see how that works, and then I'll fill in the gaps afterwards. Heather Well, it's been really interesting speaking with you three, so I'd like to thank you for such a good conversation. So thank you, all three of you.

Heather Thanks, Heather. Thanks Heather. Thanks Heather.  I really appreciate you listening to this episode with the founding members of FIKA, Book and Zine. I hope you really enjoyed it. For more information about the group, including their social media handles, check out the episode notes. I'd really appreciate it if you could also rate and review the podcast in the podcast apps.

In the final episode, I have a really interesting conversation with Holly Revelle, A London based artist and photographer specializing in queer performances, portraits, and projects. I look forward to you joining me.