Life with Fifi

“Sometimes I find myself explaining to someone at 2 a.m. what a subsidy is. Or how train tickets become cheaper if you have the increased allowance – and what that is exactly. Or in which months you should email a cultural centre if you want to sell a performance. Then those people often say: “Huh, why didn’t I know this?” And: ‘Why isn’t all this just explained somewhere in simple words?’

So I started writing it myself. Because I had to figure these things out myself as a new creator, I can speak from experience. I know better than Kunstenpunt or Cultuurloket what a starting creator struggles with, because I’ve only been doing this for a few years myself. I can explain it better because some things in practice are quite different from the theory.”

Egon Schoelynck (he/him, 1996) is a Sunday child and theatre maker. His work is political-ish and can be found in black boxes, on paving stones and in collective collaborations. His artistic practice was supported by detheatermaker (’22-’25), where he explored, among other things, how to run a soap opera in a café without actors. Together with Runa Robbroeckx and Lennert De Vroey, he created KAK, an ecological shitshow (2025). He also solves global problems with punk songs and children’s instruments, under the name Middle Class Babypunk.

This publication is based on a project by Despina Vassiliadou that ran from 2015-16. It presents a collection of photographs taken during the period, accompanied by fictional short stories.

In I presumed possession, my language, my loss, I begin in third person to write about what it means to lose a mother tongue, and about how that loss is never natural but engineered: by state assessments, border conditions, and a free market of articulation. I write about language as transaction—what you gain in the language of power at the cost of becoming inarticulate in the language of origin. I write about the monolingual paradigm as a political demand rather than a natural inheritance, about standardization as a form of border-drawing, and about the grief of hearing the people you love measured as insufficient. The text moves between the personal and the structural, between a grandmother forgetting and a language policy forbidding. It is about what we lose, and about what we have learned to accept as acceptable to lose.

Cecilie Fang is an anti-disciplinary artist and writer from China and Denmark, based in Amsterdam. Generated through writing, her process-oriented work unfolds across performance, publication, material micro-performativity, and installation.

This collection of 20 poems by young poets Holly Miles and Joseph Dunkerley sheds a glimpse into the bizarre journey of two isolated souls in a time of global crisis. Read along in this 24 page zine as they chart their unique perspectives of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic!

In collaboration with Laurent Poleo-Garnier, NIGHTNIGHT is an archive of images and texts from different sources addressing the theme of the night. Over the book as a party that degenerates with fatigue, alcohol and other stimulants, images and layout deteriorate, the subjects get tired, the vision is cloudy...

One Big Bang brings together 78 charcoal and pastel drawings from Adel Abdessemed's recent series Nature Morte and Politics of Drawing, where everyday objects, animals, and flowers are subtly charged with tension. Through these works, Abdessemed explores the intersections of beauty, fragility, and unrest. With texts by Hélène Cixous and David Elliott, One Big Bang offers a thoughtful entry into an artist's visual language shaped by memory, myth, and political urgency.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at Projeckt Brussels in 2024.

Adel Abdessemed (born 1971 in Constantine, Algeria, lives and works in Paris and Berlin) deconstructs identity codes, tackling head-on the tensions that permeate our society. His works, with their typical simplicity—sculptural installations, drawings, photographs, videos and performances—echo precise facts and familiar situations, but go beyond narrative commentary and militant criticism. Adel Abdessemed questions, among other things, the social and economic status of the artist in a system where his foothold is slight, by shrewdly keeping a distance in a gesture of subversive and committed resignation.

Abdessemed refuses to be limited to a single ideology. In his early works he passionately tackled religious, sexual, and taboos subjects and his later exhibitions have often focused on the theme of global violence. In an interview with Elisabeth Lebovici he stated, "I do not live between two cultures. I am not a postcolonial artist. I am not working on the scar and am not mending anything. I am just a detector … In the public sphere, I use passion and rage. Nothing else. I don't do illusions."

Sometimes reduced to a simple word, as in "Mohammedkarlpolpot" (1999), a condensation of names evoking totalitarism and religion, and sometimes complex and monumental installations such as "Habibi" (2004), a suspended skeleton of 17 meters propelled by a jet engine, Abdessemed's practice belongs to a new generation of artists who appeared recently on the French art scene, looking to offer another perspective on culture and identity.

A forgotten mid-century genius, recently rediscovered in France and never before translated into English, Hélène Bessette is a treasure and a bracing force to reckon with.

With a contribution by Eimear McBride
A New Yorker Best Book of 2025

Lili Is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel, conveys with singular force the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother, Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette's stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love—of desire run cold—and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial 1953 publication for its boundary-pushing style, Lili Is Crying catapulted Bessette to cult status in France. The novel is moving and maddening in turns, with its characters trapped in their own cruelties and sorrows, but in its spareness and strength it feels true. "Show me a woman who's chosen something." Bessette's books were hailed for their unusual economy of expression, rarity, strange humor, and sheer vivacity. She characterized her new kind of novel as "a freshly cut slice of life, whose force comes from its lack of commentary."

This new body of work consists of paintings featuring heart-headed figures in various emotional states and situations that sometimes teeter between the ordinary and extraordinary. From tender amorous moments to unexpected skate scenes, the work is full of the next iteration of emotive "schmoo" characters.

Mark Gonzales ("The Gonz") is an American artist and professional skateboarder best known for his profound contribution to the development of street skateboarding from the mid-1980s onward. Gonzales' creative outlook is evident in his ability to perform inventive new tricks using the existing framework of urban architecture like handrails, stairs, and ledges. His artwork grew out of the same environment as his skateboarding and includes illustrating zines, which often have surreal and humorous characters, as well as producing and collaborating on projects with Harmony Korine and Spike Jonze. Born on June 1, 1968 in South Gate, CA, he began skateboarding by the age of 13 and formed the company Blind Skateboards in 1989. While pursuing his sporting career, the artist began drawing in his free time and created graphics for Krooked Skateboards. Since then, he has collaborated with the clothing brand Supreme and Adidas to name just a few. He lives and works in New York.

New edition of one of the founding works of Language writing. 

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language — — the things people say and the ways they say them — shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.

The bilingual book ‘Aesopica’ documents and extends Rūta Junevičiūtė’s research on the Aesopian language and the influence of political censorship to contemporary collective body, first presented in 2020 as the eponymous solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and as a permanent outdoor installation at the Rupert Art Center, Vilnius. 

Taking as a starting point the historical phenomenon of Aesopian language, which was widespread in Lithuanian culture during the Soviet era, and in parts of the Russian Empire as early as the 19th century, Junevičiūtė aims to investigate the interrelationship between generations, the gray zones of collective identity creation and the processes of (un)censoring the archives of our bodies.

Aesopian language – a term coined after Ancient Greek fabulist Aesop (gr. Aísōpos), is a type of cryptic communication system, where a text has several layers of meaning often contradictory to each other and which seek to convey official and subversive hidden meanings simultaneously. It is usually employed under conditions of omnipresent state censorship to communicate officially forbidden or taboo subjects and opinions. As a system it contains three members – an author, a censor, and a reader. It uses various modes of circumlocution and euphemisation, innuendo and poetic paraphrasing, which can also be seen as an aesthetic style. It has been advocated for artistic benefits as poetics of omissions, concealment, and travesty. On the other hand, it has been criticized as a sign of conformity and humiliation. In Lithuania, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been popularly regarded as a position of dissent, but such an interpretation received criticism from contemporary scholars. “Such a mode of expression is probably as old as censorship itself” – a historian told us.

Text contributors: Alfonsas Andriuškevičius, Edgaras Gerasimovičius, Rūta Junevičiūtė, Goshka Macuga, Anastasia Sosunova, Grėtė Šmitaitė, Tomas Venclova, Ana Vujanović

Language editors: Dangė Vitkienė, Aira Niauronytė, Gemma Lloyd

Translators: Alexandra Bondarev, Erika Lastovskytė, Justinas Šuliokas, Mantė Zagurskytė-Tamulevičienė, Aistis Žekevičius.

Illustrations: Rūta Junevičiūtė.