TOO MUCH

Too Much: A Zine (July 2020, Virtual)

curator & designer

There was a lot of anxiety in 2020. I didn’t know what to do with it all. I knew other people were struggling with their mental health too - but it was almost something that couldn’t be discussed, as if the experience itself was too intense to describe, to understand. So I decided to try to make art about it.

And when I got overwhelmed after writing poems trying to pin down my own anxieties, wanting to turn the page and never look at them again, I started to feel like the project had to be a lot bigger than just me. So towards the end of the year, as 2020 was (somehow) starting to close and time was running out to execute it, I took the jump. I reached out to friends, to my followers on Instagram, to friends of friends. I asked them to send me written accounts of their anxieties in 2020. No rules. No length. No format. Whatever felt natural.

And I was overwhelmed - not only by how many I got, but how long and brave the submissions were. This project would not have been finished or seen the light of day if it hadn’t been for everyone’s willingness to get raw. I couldn’t let anyone down, and that’s how this was born.

A community-based pandemic project, this zine collects written submissions of 2020 anxieties from 22 contributors, each left anonymous and untouched, as a way of expanding the memory of what 2020 felt like beyond our isolated experiences. View the zine here.