Editorial: Knitting in the Middle of a Burning Building

EDITORIAL | HANGA / CRAFT

Written by Liam Hansen (they/them) | @liamhanse.n | Editor-in-Chief & written by Stella Roper (they/she) | @stellyvision | Arts Editor

Liam:

If I may pull back the curtains on Debate a bit, we’ve had the Craft issue as the penultimate theme of 2025 while we argued about the theme of our final issue. I spent most of the year rooting for us to finish off with a death issue while everyone, understandably, thought it might be a wee bit too sad. I’ve lost the argument now that the year has nearly passed with inarguably worse vibes than we entered it with, so it won’t be a summer bummer; however, this Craft issue has felt like the lifeblood keeping us going to the end of the year. 

The current Debate team largely comes from arts backgrounds that lead to us intertwining last year, allowing a disproportionate amount of staff trying to squeeze our own shows into the gig guide and a lot of stress festering within our team as arts funding has been drained, physical media has been devalued, and a host of other neofascist bullshit that we really didn’t need on top of all the other stress this year. This is to say, as we’ve been trying to explain that simple cartoon art isn’t automatically AI generated and that ChatGPT is quite bad at writing articles for student magazines, we’ve been turning to this issue as our wee love letter to print media, physical music, analogue film, handmade sweatshirts, and any other piece of art that is thoroughly, unapologetically human. 

It’s slightly ironic, given the fact that we’re all supposedly progressive lefties with pronouns and nothing but disrespect and contempt for traditions. Despite the global right trying to take us back to the 1940s, long before trans people and pronouns were invented by Lady Gaga, conservative governments here and abroad have welcomed artificial intelligence with open arms. Despite half of the generated slop being a bigger affront to god than literal Satanists, Tories love making AI art. You can take a look at National having to AI generate a “discouraged couple doing their taxes at a table in New Zealand. Maori couple.” because they couldn’t find any Māori models willing to support their propaganda, or that time the US President posted an AI video making  it utterly clear that the support of the Gaza genocide is solely to turn a profit. It’s a lot for the strongest people to deal with. 

Despite the fact that we’re a bunch of phone addicted zoomers, I don’t think anyone reading this is content with the world in this form. If nothing else, returning to physical media you remember from your childhood feels incredibly healing and reassuring. It’s far easier to process your emotions through a journal or scrapbook than it is to keep them in your head, where your anxiety is well-fed by the horrors of your devices. Even just making physical art for yourself, that never leaves your bedroom, is a constructive way to feel safer and stronger in the moment. 

However, if you do decide to share your craft with the wider world, you are, fundamentally, pissing these conservatives the HELL off. Every time you make a street poster, tapestry, or mixtape, you are rebelling against and rejecting the system being forced down our throats. It might take you four hours to make an animation that the right claims they could have made hundreds of with AI - but if you use basic critical thinking skills and have a bare minimum taste in anything creative, you’ll find the impact of your handmade projects will last for generations beyond any computer-generated waste. Particularly within younger, more frustrated sectors of society, a well-made album or film will have an exponentially bigger social impact, documented by the things I’ve seen people most excited about. Chappel Roan isn’t necessarily on the meteoric rise she had last year, but the longevity of her art has led to her booking at the top of the Laneway lineup for 2026. Even though tickets are more expensive due to the insane acts they’ve booked, I feel like the cultural excitement in Auckland for Laneway - a single day explosion of art, music, love, and food - has never been bigger. As much as mainstream media wants to pretend that teenagers and young adults have mindlessly accepted AI slop as another way to make their privileged lives easier, we’ve never cared more about real art and music than we have now. Apologies to the AI industry and neoconservatives - but your attempts to fuck us over have forced young people to cling on to art for dear life. We aren’t letting go any time soon. 

Illustration by Liam Hansen

Stella:

Last Sunday I went to the Auckland Art Gallery, on the closing day of their exhibit A Century of Modern Art. Yes, I attended an art exhibit that was open for around four months, on its closing day for the first time. Yes, I am a bad BVA graduate… please don’t tell my old lecturers. Despite the well overdue walk-through – or snake-through – the masses of rushed visitors, who had also realised that it was the final day to view the exhibit, I happened to find the whole experience quite enjoyable. After I managed to get a good look or two at all of the displayed art, I found that looking at the people who were looking at the art to be a better spent afternoon activity. As the clusters of attendees, likely familiar with eachother, dart around the space, they plow through capturing the works of Monet, Picasso and of course, Van Gogh. With often humorous and – albeit confusing at times – stances, that really make you question whether you’re the one doing it wrong, an entirely new avenue of experiencing the exhibition opened up to me. Occasionally, I’d observe a sort of choreography in the strategy of some individuals; as a scrunched brow and eagle-eyed focus is paired alongside a “two steps back, half a step forward” motion. With all this said, I’m by no means exempt  from this attempted camera coordination, and infact, it was the recognition of the strong efforts made by my fellow gallery goers’, armed with their chosen device, which made me feel less awkward when I took a pic or two myself. With the familiar memes and jokes regarding the way different generations interact with devices, particularly with taking photos, this moment showed me that this act is not to be trivialised. As cold, uncompromising expressions befall the faces of those moments away from photographing the painting in front of them, I recognised that these amateur photographers are not to be shrugged off as unserious. 

Art; displayed and archived, from one gallery to another. Anyone can create, recreate and hone a craft, even if that “craft” is capturing the work of others, you’ll be doing that in your own personalised (and perhaps a bit quirky) kind of way.

If there’s anything I’d like readers to take from this issue, it’s that there is an irreplaceable value and joy to be found in tactile creation, so go forth and pursue it, with whatever tools, mediums and subjects you happen to gravitate toward.