The Riso Drum Costs More Than the Rent. Bandung's Landlords Chose the Espresso Machine.
As café landlords chase weekend crowds, Bandung's zine makers lose the last rooms where a risograph could run for the price of a shared lease.
A risograph drum runs a few hundred dollars, and Bandung's zine collectives kept theirs alive by splitting a single room across a dozen people. That arithmetic just broke. The landlords who rented those rooms figured out that a café with a Sunday queue clears more than a print space that only fills up when someone drops a new issue.
So the machines are moving out, or moving nowhere. A riso needs floor space, ventilation, a place to hang wet prints, and a lease long enough to make the setup worth it. Weekend foot traffic needs none of that. It needs a counter, a wall for photos, and a landlord willing to sign with whoever pays fastest.
What the room actually did
The room was never just a printer. It was where someone taught you to registration-align two colors by hand, where the ink smell told you a batch was drying, where a collective could run 50 copies of a comic about eviction and sell them at cost the same weekend. Take away the room and every part of that goes freelance. You email a commercial press, pay per copy, and price the zine so high nobody in the scene can buy it.
That is the quiet cost. A commercial print job wants a minimum run and a deposit. A shared riso wanted your Saturday and a share of the ink budget. One of those keeps a 22-year-old making work. The other tells them to come back when they have capital.
The café was always going to win the lease
Bandung sells itself on this. The city's whole tourist pitch runs on the idea that every alley has a design studio or a coffee bar worth a photo. The studios that built that reputation are the ones getting priced out by the coffee bars cashing it in. Landlords read the receipts, and a printmaker's receipts do not compete with a Sunday brunch rush.
You can call it gentrification. The people losing the rooms have been through this cycle before, each move pushing them further from the campuses and the print shops that made the collective possible in the first place. Every move sheds members who cannot follow.
Some collectives are trying the obvious workaround: pool cash, buy their own drum, find a garage no landlord wants. That plan lasts exactly as long as the garage does. The moment that block gets its own café, the same math comes for the same room.
What survives is the file, not the object. A zine becomes a PDF in a group chat, a scan on someone's drive, a thing you read on a phone instead of hold. That is not the same trade. The point of the riso was that it made a physical thing cheap enough to give away. Lose the room, and the cheapest thing left to hand a stranger is a link.
