Risograph revival: How a forgotten printer built a global DIY art movement

Episode 27: Risograph Transcript

Julia Dixon Evans: One unassuming day in the mid-1980s when 20-year-old Jan Dirk de Wilde was living in a squat in the Netherlands, the doorbell rang.

At the time, Jan Dirk was part of an historic protest movement, but the visitor at the door would quietly ignite a different kind of revolution. They were dropping off an old, dusty machine they thought Jan Dirk's squat might be able to use.

Jan Dirk de Wilde: But nobody wanted to have it. It was there in the main space. And then I started using it as a gimmick.

Evans: The moment set off a chain reaction, launching a global creative movement. And that machine was a stencil printer.

Kevin Huynh: These are drums. I'm just changing the drum colors right now. With Riso, you print a color at a time.

Evans: This is Kevin Huynh at Burn All Books in Normal Heights. He's using a Risograph printer, an updated version of what was dropped off at Jan Dirk's squat 40 years ago.

Huynh: People call it a mix between screen printing and just a copy machine, which is pretty accurate 'cause it feels like this physical process that's also digital.

Evans: If it wasn't for Jan Dirk getting that unusual machine all those years ago and experimenting with it, Kevin might not be here using the Risograph today.

Huynh: They kind of just languished in church basements and school storage rooms until artists got ahold of them and started using them again.

Evans: Even if you don't know what a Risograph is, you might still recognize its distinctive prints: vibrant colors, a matte finish, slight imperfections. It's gone kind of mainstream in the past few years.

Today, we're tracing this strange, unlikely journey of the Risograph in art, from a squat in the Netherlands to its early American pioneers and finally to a community print studio in San Diego.

It's a story about artists repurposing a machine never meant for art. A machine that became obsolete and found an unlikely second life.

But the Risograph story is bigger than printing. This quirky machine has fueled scrappy DIY groups all over the map. Communities built outside the mainstream — authentic, supportive and a little rebellious. Rebellious in the sense of doing something different together to change the world they're living in. One of those communities is right here in San Diego.

Manda Bernal: People are guided by love more than anything else and support and I think that's why it's grown so organically and beautifully and supported so many people.

Evans: What does a once cast aside printing technology have to do with a local group's hope to keep artists making art in San Diego? And how can that work sustain genuine connections, especially in the midst of this tech-fueled loneliness epidemic? To find out, we're going back to where it all began.

From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest. A podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

[Theme Music]

Evans: Today, Jan Dirk runs Knust in Nijmegen, an independent print studio and collective in the Netherlands. They're known as the pioneers of Riso printing.

De Wilde: But I think it's funny that it's so big nowadays. 'Till 2000, we were more or less the only Riso printer.

Evans: Jan Dirk became an early origin point for the Riso art movement in the western world. Because Riso printing in art is so new, it's relatively easy to trace its history. And starting from Jan Dirk and Knust, you can trace a web of influence that spreads around the globe. They weren't trying to launch a movement, they were just experimenting. And it all unfolded while they were living in a perfect setting for pushing limits, but one that was far from idyllic.

De Wilde: There was a big squatting movement as a form of protest against city government and there were a lot of squats.

Evans: Squatting is when people live in or occupy abandoned buildings without permission or without paying rents. In the early 1980s, Nijmegen saw a serious shortage of affordable housing. The city council was conservative and young people were being pushed out.

De Wilde: It was pretty intense. So, at one point there were maybe 80 or 90 squats.

Evans: There were fires, riots, police and military were even deployed to suppress the movement. Jan Dirk and his friends moved into an abandoned bank at the center of the conflict. Others in the movement took over an elaborate network of old school buildings and warehouses.

De Wilde: It was sort of a parallel universe, so everything was inside there. There was their own printer. They had their own theater. There was a bar. They had their own radio. They had actually two bars. And the squat where I was, was only the bookshop.

Evans: The squatters in Nijmegen reacted to the problems they saw in their own society by creating an alternative one. This kind of fierce independence, working outside the mainstream society and economy — this is the DIY ethos in a nutshell.

De Wilde: Most of the squatters came from the activist background. I was more interested in the punk movement and the do-it-yourself movement.

Evans: And in Jan Dirk's bookshop squat, he started printing.

De Wilde: The squatters' newspaper from Nijmegen, that's where I learned the first things about printing.

Evans: At that point, Jan Dirk used an offset printer, which produces precise prints using plates, ink rollers and cylinders. But stencil printers work with a master, essentially a stencil with open and closed areas. The ink is pushed through the open areas and all the copies are made from that original master. Jan Dirk had heard of stencil machines, but he didn't think much of them.

De Wilde: The offset printer, which had a higher quality, made me a little bit snobby. Like, I'm not going to use stencil machines because they are really activists or for schools and they have bad quality.

Evans: But then one showed up at his front door. This stencil printer was old. Nobody wanted it or understood its value, but Jan Dirk was curious enough to bring it back to life.

De Wilde: And then when I looked at it, I could see that there was some image on it, text of a school which was from the '60s.

Evans: This is a universal stencil printing experience. You inherit an old machine that's been tossed aside, replaced by a more modern printer, but it still has the master in it from the last print job it performed.

De Wilde: So I just went to a stationery shop and bought ink there and put it in. And then I could print something which was put on the machine 25 years ago.

Evans: This was among the first of hundreds of stencil printer resurrections that would occur all over the world.

De Wilde: And then I found out the good things about the machine.

Evans: He liked how he didn't have to clean the machine as often, but also how it printed one vivid color at a time, how its imprecise nature made every print a little different and unpredictable in an interesting way.

With his DIY and punk background, Jan Dirk saw value — even beauty — in this discarded and forgotten thing. And he realized that the technical weaknesses of the tool — the stuff that he at first dismissed — could actually be strengths. A couple of years after the machine showed up on his doorstep, he made his first stencil printed zine, a humble book that would change his life and ripple across the art world.

De Wilde: And then at one point I just thought, OK, now I know the machine. And I stapled everything in and then I went to Amsterdam with somebody and then there was one bookshop who thought it was really, was really attracted by it and they sold like hundreds of copies.

Evans: Jan Dirk's stencil machine experiment was a hit. He and his friends continued tinkering and their distinctive, colorful prints turned heads and attracted artists curious about the aesthetics. Along with a few other collaborators, Jan Dirk launched Knust. They eventually upgraded to a Risograph machine, which creates its stencil masters digitally and prints more consistently. With their Riso machine, they created zines and prints with a unique visual texture with a matte finish different from the gloss of conventional ink. And soon the creatives at Knust were teaching others how to use a Risograph in art. And they established a sort of artist residency program, offering space for artists to live, work, create and learn.

De Wilde: We didn't know what residencies were, but if somebody liked the process, they had to come to us. We had a lot of people from everywhere come wanting to print.

Evans: The Riso art community they jumpstarted was open and accessible, but still relatively small and very niche — mostly in Europe. But about 25 years after Jan Dirk first started using a stencil machine in his squat, that started to change. Riso printing started to spread.

De Wilde: 'Till around 2010, we could keep track of all of the artists and designers who were using the machines. But now it's undoable.

Evans: And around 2010, one of Knust's Riso printed books crossed the ocean and ended up in the hands of an artist in Michigan. It was a seed that would grow an American Riso printing world.

George Wietor: The first book that made me think, oh my God, this is what Riso can do and what it is, that was Knust. A Knust book is the thing that really convinced me that this is what I have to get involved in.

Evans: This is George Wietor. When he first became enamored with Knust Riso prints, there were very few Riso printers in the United States. George was already into printing, making posters in his own version of Jan Dirk's DIY scene.

Wietor: I am the co-founder of this place called the Division Avenue Arts Collective. It was an all-ages music and art venue in downtown Grand Rapids. You know, community potlucks, Sunday soups, which is like a microgranting thing. And the idea is that you would get together, share a bowl soup, everyone would pitch in $5, and then we would hear people's artistic or creative project ideas and then vote, and then whoever got the most votes would get the full amount. In a town that didn't really have much of a functional arts council, it was a way to do some direct funding of creative projects.

Evans: But the DIY ethos, at least at first, is not what attracted George to Knust's prints. He just loved the way they looked and felt.

Wietor: I've never been a huge fan of Xerox. I don't like things that are shiny. I don't like the idea of melting plastic to paper as a way of making a mark. So the vividness of the color, the way that the ink sits on and then gets absorbed by the paper, those are two things that are really, really important to me. And once I started looking up and really becoming a fan of all of these European presses, I started looking for a machine of my own. And that's where I learned they were everywhere.

Evans: Risograph printing in art has a different trajectory and story from commercial Riso printing. RISO Kagaku Corporation, known now as RISO is a Japanese brand. After World War II, Japan faced supply shortages and extensive import and trade restrictions. So the founder invented an ink that could be produced domestically and then eventually developed the Risograph machine, an advanced stencil printer to use that ink.

Back in the '80s and '90s, back when Jan Dirk and the folks at Knust were forging the machine's path in art — pretty much on their own — risographs were still in operation and still a big deal with large businesses and institutions around the world.

Wietor: Any place where you're making a million copies of the same thing: schools, hospitals, I know the American military had a really huge contract,

I've heard about Risos on submarines. It's so much more economically efficient to print a leaflet on a Riso than it is to do that on an Inkjet or, even worse, a laser jet where they're reforming the image with every instance. With a Riso, you just make the image once and then you run a million copies through it. It's really perfect for this type of thing.

Evans: But in the 2000s, printer and copier tech just got better and those old stencil duplicators became obsolete, banished to basements around the world to collect dust.

Wietor: Grand Rapids is a place that has historically a lot of churches. And so I found out that each one of them at one point had a Riso.

Evans: George became one of the first American artists to search those basements for forgotten Risograph printers.

Wietor: I bought my first machine in 2010, but I really started publishing stuff in 2011. I spent about a year trying to learn the machine and that year of struggle is kind of what led to the rest of my life with relationship to Riso because that's when I realized I was like completely on my own. There was no Riso community in the United States in particular whatsoever at that time.

Evans: He reached out to European Riso artists like Jon Dirk at Knust for support. The more he learned, the more he fell in love. He embraced the challenge of printing one color at a time and separating the images into layers, and he began to accept and appreciate the machine's unpredictability and let go of his own perfectionism.

Wietor: But ultimately what really, really kept me going is as communities started to form, that's been the best part.

Evans: Gradually, more American artists began following in George's footsteps, unearthing their own machines for their own creative practice. These artists became friends online.

Wietor: We just started talking everyday about print.

Evans: And George became the documentarian of the burgeoning movement through a Wiki-style website.

Wietor: I started this project called The Atlas of Modern Risography, which is meant to be sort of a census of people using Risos around the world, because it felt like there wouldn't possibly be a community unless we knew each other existed. Now I pretty much don't add anything and there's over a thousand listings.

Evans: There's something inherently rebellious in the Riso printing movement. In a way, it's defying the natural course of technology. The Risograph had its great run — just like the telegraph and the fax machine — and better printers and copiers came along and made it obsolete. But this art movement is refusing to let it die and making its own alternate reality where this old tech is becoming fresh and vibrant again.

And the community of DIY-minded people like Knust and George that have shepherded this movement and ethos also has a stronghold right here in San Diego. We'll take you there after the break. Stay with us.

[Music]

Evans: As the Riso community spread across the U.S., artists began organizing meetings. At the first North American Riso Conference held in Chicago in 2017, George said he met Nick Bernal, who co-founded Burn All Books with his wife, Manda. Nick and Manda grew up together in San Diego and met in junior high school.

Manda Bernal: When I was 21, I got married and then we've just been together forever and ever and ever.

Evans: Around the time of that conference, Nick had discovered Risograph printing, and he convinced Manda to attend a Risograph workshop with him in L.A.

Manda Bernal: I was like super into it right away after that. Nick already knew that he was gonna like it a lot.

Evans: Shortly after, they ran into a friend at an art show.

Manda Bernal: So we just told him that we took this workshop. We wish that there was a machine down here. And he said, well, I have a machine and it's broken and it's in my friend's garage. If you think you could fix it, you could totally use it. And I was like, sure, I'll fix it. I haven't fixed anything, like really anything in my life. It's like, yeah, I could do that. So then we picked it up in Chula Vista, and I found a tech manual online, like PDF, and I found a bunch of old threads from this message board called Copy TechNet from 2010 and figured out how to get this door to close on this machine and get this drum unstuck. And then I freaking printed it, what was on the drum already, and it was an ad for a nail salon that was around the corner from where I grew up in Santee. And that's when I realized that this machine had been at the print shop that was next to my house. This Riso was just there that whole time. So that was the first machine I had, and it just had one drum.

Evans: Nick and Manda set up their Riso machine in a back room at Verbatim Books in North Park, where they both worked. They invited people in to experiment, learn and print together — DIY style. They called their project Burn All Books.

Manda Bernal: We're really just art lovers and doodlers and neither of us had any formal arts background or education.

Evans: Let me tell you a little story about the Risograph and me. I first met Manda and Nick when they were getting started with Burn All Books, and became fascinated by the unusual, ephemeral output of the Risograph.

At the time, I was struggling with creativity in a big way. I'd recently published my first novel through the traditional publishing process and the pressure of creating the next thing was an anxiety I was not prepared for. I was unable to write anything new for fear of it not being good enough to publish again, feeling like I needed to knock it out of the park this time. Creating something simply for the joy of following a spark felt out of reach, and that made me feel detached from the creative community.

But Risograph printing and the local DIY art scene offered a different path, supporting artists right where they were. The Risograph movement seems all about that joy and spark. It's accessible, welcoming and built on the shoulders of community, of artists supporting artists. Printing one of my short stories on Risograph and holding it in my hands felt revolutionary. Not just for my own creative pursuits, but I felt part of the cultural fabric of the city again — just from a sheet of paper and ink.

Evans: One of the first things Nick and Manda told me one year into Burn All Books was that they wanted to do their part to keep artists in San Diego by offering viable printing options locally, and fostering a community of DIY-minded creatives to share ideas and bring them to life.

Nick Bernal: We like to point at others. We like to guide people to others. In San Diego, we forget that there's such a rich history of artists here. I don't know. We love it here. That's why we're staying here and making stuff.

Evans: So they built a little Riso world here, publishing zines and literary journals, and a monthly mail mag with local writing and art. During COVID, they had to close their shop behind Verbatim Books. And the bigger project went on a break. It could have been the end of the Riso community experiment, but in the midst of their hibernation, one of their friends scoped out a huge opportunity.

Manda Bernal: And our friend Ali, who I always call the DIY real estate agent because he is just always scoping for rent signs and texting people, messaged us that this space was open.

Evans: Since I've been reporting on art in San Diego, countless indie art spaces have been shuttered. Whether from losing a lease or the artists moving away, finding and keeping a space is essential to creating and sharing art. It hearkens back to the squatters in the Netherlands: That fundamental need to have a space to gather, organize and create. Here in San Diego, it's a constant struggle for artists or arts organizations. The cost of real estate exacerbates the problem. So it was a big deal when Manda and Nick's DIY real estate friend found them a strange but affordable space: an old TV shop on the edge of Normal Heights. And like so much of what they have accomplished, finding the spot was a group effort.

Manda Bernal: You need a network of people who wanna help you that's something cobbled together very slowly over a long period of time. I just feel like so much of our success, to me, has felt like a combination of flukes and really wonderful favors and opportunities.

Evans: That building now houses a store, gallery and printing studio for Burn All Books, and the headquarters for Scanners Archive, their nonprofit community zine archive. Burn All Books also operates a newsstand in Bread & Salt and still sells zines and prints elsewhere. A patchwork of projects and income. They make it work.

Manda Bernal: Consignment at the bookstore and off of our subscription program and off of sales at the shop, and we're able to pay for the space and everyday I am like, whoa, how are we doing that? It's not by a huge margin, we're working with the hundreds of dollars here but it's working and we've been able to sustain it.

Evans: On a chilly night in November, producer Anthony and I visited the shop.

Nick Bernal: Anthony?

Anthony Wallace: Yeah.

Nick Bernal: This is Manda.

Wallace: Hey, Manda. How's it going?

Nick Bernal: My name's Nick.

Wallace: Nick?

Nick Bernal: Nick. Yeah.

Evans: Are you recording?

Wallace: Yep.

Evans: He was recording all of that, guys.

Wallace: Always recording.

Evans: The space is cozy, colorful and eclectic. There are plants and bright bookshelves and tables covered in books and Riso-printed zines and posters.

Anthony, they're printing the calendar.

Wallace: Oh, they are? Oh, the 2026 calendar. Amazing.

Evans: We have the Burn All Books annual Riso-printed calendar at our desks at The Finest, so we were a little starstruck when we heard they were printing the 2026 edition.

At that moment, tucked in the back of the shop, their friend Kevin was printing away.

What color did you just put in?

Huynh: I put in a yellow drum. Typically we print lightest to darkest. It just makes the process easier.

Evans: This art uses three layers of color. This particular page has yellow, pink and blue. Kevin runs the same 150 sheets of paper through the Riso machine for each layer. He picks up each large cylinder of bright ink, latches it into place and lets the machine do the rest.

Huynh: So if you see, even with two colors, it's already so much more dynamic.

Wallace: Yeah. It's awesome.

Huynh: Yeah.

Wallace: It's very satisfying to see it come together…

Huynh: A hundred percent.

Wallace: … like one color at a time.

Huynh: Yeah, exactly.

Evans: Fourteen local artists contributed to the 2026 calendar. While most of the artists are familiar with designing for Risograph, the Riso can be unpredictable. An exact replica of your image isn't always a guarantee.

Huynh: Because it's not a completely machine run process. It's like every sheet of paper will be jostled around a little bit. And kind of become imperfect.

Evans: This page is a colorful take on the famous Matisse painting of people dancing in a circle holding hands, with an intricate border. But each of the 150 copies Kevin printed turned out a little different from stencil and paper movement or how each color layered or saturated. The effect is one-of-a-kind and undeniably cool.

Huynh: I don't even know what happened here.

Wallace: Oh yeah. With the like white?

Huynh: Yeah. That pink was supposed to go in that white spot.

Evans: Kevin has worked with Nick and Manda almost since the beginning when they fixed up their first Riso. Just like George Wietor, Kevin loves the Risograph, but it's the people he works with that really keeps him coming back.

Huynh: I pretty much wouldn't do this if it wasn't for that aspect. I think any do-it-yourself, DIY space is ultimately about the community you build. Doing all this labor oftentimes for free isn't really worth it if you don't like what you're doing. I think I'd have a hard time doing this with people who I don't consider my friends.

Evans: Today, Burn All Books is a lot more than printing.

Manda Bernal: We were able to amass like just an enormous group of friends, really. Like they're all volunteers who run their own projects and their own programming, but people who come here every week on a Tuesday just because they want to. It's pretty crazy.

Evans: Just on the other side of the printer room door, those dedicated collaborators were assembling for that weekly meeting, passing around homemade bread.

BAB friend: Is it made with rosemary?

BAB friend: No, it's za'atar.

BAB friend: Oh!

Evans: Once everyone got their snacks, I asked them about what draws them to Risograph printing, DIY art and this community.

Paloma: Print is such an accessible medium and it's kind of lowbrow and it could be any sort of format: poetry, comics, illustration.

Galia: That's where zines came from, printing pamphlets and spreading them around.

Phillip: Kind of what I was thinking is the Riso printing and the idea that we have this means of getting information out is kind of the method and then the message is creative community.

Evans: At a time when it seems like almost our entire life takes place on a screen, when loneliness is reaching an all time high, Burn All Books is about coming together in person and doing tangible creative projects collectively. If Jan Dirk, Knust and their movement came out of protest, in a way it seems like Burn All Books is also in part a protest against isolation.

Manda Bernal: I think we are all in that cycle of trying to get off of the endless scroll and try to make things in person.

Evans: Some of their programs and initiatives are pretty clearly centered on just making friends.

Jill: We have a program called Platonic Speed Dating.

Tia: And I was a participant first and I had never done speed dating, so it was terrifying. But the platonic one was especially wholesome because it was around Thanksgiving last year, and then I went to a Friendsgiving with some people that had been there. So it was really beautiful.

Evans: Burn All Books hosts PowerPoint parties, book and film clubs, concerts, writing groups, art shows and workshops. These are open to anyone interested and you can check their Instagram or website for upcoming events. Or you can just pop in anytime to browse or pick up a book. Upfront is the shop stocked with indie titles and prints from around the world and, of course, San Diego.

Manda Bernal: All of it's stuff we just sort of decided to do, and it's just amazing what can happen if you get just a few people in a group to work on something. That's the best part of this for us. It's like a friend-making venture. So this is how we made friends as adults.

Evans: It sounds simple, but, for Nick, trying new things with a community of people he really cares about has also been transformative.

Nick Bernal: Maybe the dream was to feel connected to other people, to be like off of spaces where connection feels disingenuous or manufactured, and to do the messy work of meeting people and having to be yourself and failing. You know, that stuff's hard and it's easier to not do all that work and to live a whole life. So I feel lucky. I feel like I've found a way out of something that I'm not sure that I was aware that I was trapped in or something. I don't know.

Manda Bernal: Everyday I'm here I'm just like, wow, I get to do this again.

I'm just gonna enjoy this for as long as it lasts. But yeah, we do try to do as much as we can to sustain ourselves to the future because it's so important to a lot of people besides us. But I think that also makes it more solvent, right? People are invested in it with their time and you know, their relationships. And that's, that means something too.

Evans: The human connections that Burn All Books has built are hard to measure, but it gives their venture real value. And that's what's at the root of the Riso art movement's winding story: people figuring stuff out in community and making art. Back in the Netherlands, Jon Dirk didn't like the world he was handed, so he helped build a new one. With Knust, he didn't just pioneer a new way of printing, he figured out how to resurrect old unwanted machines because he knew they could still make something beautiful. Years later in the United States, George scrapped together a collection of Risograph printers, one Wiki post at a time, helping to spawn the kind of workshops that introduced Manda and Nick to Riso printing.

And after that life-changing workshop, they built Burn All Books — part store, part press, part network of art, events and true friends. It's an empowering idea: If you want to make something, whether it's an art print in those unmistakable hues of pinks and yellows or make a community, figure out how to DIY it, then just try.

Manda Bernal: I don't think I ever really considered that art could have a permanent place in my life even until I sort of discovered DIY. Most things you really can just teach yourself to some extent. You can sort of learn how to produce just about anything, whether it's a variety show, a zine at a music fair or a booklet or a workshop series, someone knows how to do it or has done something similar and is gonna be willing to teach us about it. You just have to be brave enough to ask, I guess.

[Music]

Evans: A special thanks to Manda and Nick Bernal, Kevin, Paloma, Jill, Phillip, Noelle, Tia and everyone at Burn All Books, and to Jan Dirk de Wilde and Joyce Guley from Knust and to George Wietor for their help with this episode.

You can find photos of Risograph art and Risograph machines on our website at KPBS.org/TheFinest, and thank you so much for listening.

If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, leave a rating or comment. It makes a real difference and helps stories like these reach more people. Also, we print them out and read them aloud at our desks.

Next week on The Finest, we meet a local entrepreneur challenging the chocolate industry from inside her home kitchen.

Ely Rosales Aguilar: I was really amazed. I was like, what? You can do this at home. Are you kidding me?

Evans: I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer, lead writer and composer is Anthony Wallace. Our engineer is Ben Redlawsk, and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.