Zoo Index - Reader (volume 1)

Revue du Master de Textes et de Création Littéraire de la Cambre*

Avec les textes de: Sam Bouffandeau, Chloé Clemens, Chloé Delchini, Perrine Estienne, Robin Faymonville, Gabriel René Franjou, Justine Gensse, Adèle Goardet, Bastien Hauser, Giulia Lazzara, Cyprien Muth, Sephora Shebabo.

* Le Master en Textes et Création Littéraire de l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre propose un programme de formation aux étudiants qui visent à faire des métiers du texte et de la création littéraire leur avenir professionnel. Il s’adresse principalement aux jeunes écrivains et, plus généralement, à l’étudiant qui souhaite professionnaliser sa démarche artistique en lien avec la pratique de l’écrit en la confrontant à d’autres écrivains, à des éditeurs et à des professionnels reconnus de la littérature, l’informer et l’enrichir de nouveaux savoirs et de nouvelles compétences. Considérant le travail du texte et ses différentes formes comme des expressions majeures de l’homme à travers l’histoire, et les littératures des différents continents comme un art à part entière dans le champ des pratiques artistiques contemporaines, ce Master s’inscrit dans une démarche ouverte de production, de réflexion et d’instruction de l’écrit dans un monde en devenir.

DUCTUS is the latest solo project by Paul Abbott, featuring 51 minutes of audio, across 12 tracks, and a 42 page booklet featuring new writing. DUCTUS was written and recorded in Edinburgh and Porto in 2019. 

DUCTUS presents a playful weave of collapsing time through a number of speculative elements and fictional characters. Abbott feels his way through learning drums, rhythm and writing as fleshy research technologies. DUCTUS is the latest stage in a process considering sound, the body, imagination, and language through music. This features as part of ongoing investigations using real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing.

Resistance dispatch 002

In 2024, the documentary No Other Land, co-produced by Palestinian and Jewish activists from Masafer Yatta drew internattional attention at film festivals, bringing the long-standing occupation, demolitions, and violence in the region into broader public view. 

The starting point of this publication emerged from an impromptu decision to draw a family tree covering roughly five hundred villagers of Umm al-Kheir. The author follows two threads simultaneously: one traces verifiable institutional and geographic transformations, tracking how a community is systematically rendered illegal through planning regimes and court rulings; the other comes from lived encounters, oral testimony, and the moments when people entrusted me with their names, their kinship ties, and their past.

Printed by Bleed Print

Drama, careers, sabotage, compromises... The first issue of Suckcess Magazine begins with a selection of poems by the flamboyant Rene Ricard, edited with the help of Editions Lutanie, and continues with contributions from Miriam Laura Leonardi, Fabienne Audéoud, Camille Aleña, Gabi Losoncy, David Lieske, Sylvie Fanchon, Won Jin Choi, Estelle Hoy, and Bunny Rogers. Cartoons and tennis players are also on the program.

In the fall of 2017, Obe Alkema got acquainted with the American poet Kevin Killian, first at the New Narrative conference at UC Berkeley, then at the Poets & Critics Symposium in Paris that was all about his poetry. A year and a half later, Alkema traveled back to Paris, this time as a participant of a writing residency. He was there to research the landscape of memory, but more than he expected and initially realized, Kevin’s death the previous month (June 2019) affected his return. Besides inevitable, mourning and remembering became obsessions for Alkema, as he shows in ‘My Kevin, Our Paris’, a memoir about Kevin Killian (1952–2019), but especially about his Kevin and their Paris.

Ce que je vois, c’est comment un animal se détermine à créer une relation avec un garçon malheureux.

Fiction vu en boucle gamine, que je superposais à ma chienne, une colley comme Lassie.

Suivi par Émilie Ferrat.

An artist's book presenting a photographic study of onions.

On Onions is a photographic study of onions by artist Elad Lassry (born 1977). Characteristically highlighting the spectrum of hues and shapes for the vegetable, Lassry's selected taxonomy includes sections on red, yellow and white onions, each of which possesses its own distinct taste and benefits. On Onions is Lassry's first artist's book, and the work will exist only in book form; it is at once wry, refreshing and disorienting in its biology workbook style, which makes fruitful use of "the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph" (as the artist has described his practice in general).

Composed by the artist and arranged by Stuart Bailey, the book includes an essay written by Angie Keefer about the effects of sliced onions on human tear ducts.

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang

The new edition of Salinger's ever-relevant series of 1980s and '90s teenagers in their bedrooms. 

Bedrooms contain the past, the present and the future; they are sites of continual transformation. Popular culture and fashion continually change and recycle. While specific objects of decor change over time, teenagers' bedrooms are still private sanctuaries: spaces for safely experimenting during a time in life when one is forming and expressing ever-evolving identities.

Upon its release in 1995, Adrienne Salinger's book In My Room was an immediate success, selling nearly 24,000 copies in its first few years. The continued popularity of this work made in the '80s and '90s is curious. However, over the nearly 30 years since, and especially in the most recent decade of social media, the work's appeal has grown tremendously. In some cases, the work evokes nostalgia, but not primarily so. Adrienne Salinger hears from current teenagers often; many send her pictures of their bedrooms today. Social media encourages users to endlessly "rebrand" their identities, creating idealized fantasies, striving for perfection. These photographs are not about perfection. They give voice to the contradictions of our identities.

Hundreds of print and online articles, interviews and features on In My Room have been published and the work has been exhibited at museums all around the world. Long out of print and now considered a classic, with only a rare few available on the secondary market, the book returns in a new expanded edition as Teenagers in Their Bedrooms. With 26 additional photographs, this treasure is made available once more to new audiences.

Adrienne Salinger has published three photobooks: In My Room (1995), Living Solo (1999) and Middle Aged Men (2007). She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of New Mexico.

What words made this world of captivity and extinction? If written language is a biological adaptation, how can a text reshape the environment? These are the questions at the heart of Grammar of the Cage, a startling first collection of poetry by Pam Ore. The Compulsive Reader calls Ore "a poet of great promise," and poet Eloise Klein Healy says she has found Ore's book "haunting but necessary...a stunning debut collection."

Grammar of the Cage is clean and heartbreaking as a bone, and yet, as poet Ingrid Wendt writes in her Introduction, "[like] Emily Dickinson, Ore's 'business' is 'to sing.' And sing she does."