Dyke Affair Vol. 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.

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.

“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.

Referring to Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of 'wild tongue' (Borderlands/ La Frontera, 1987), the publication departs from the questions: How to tame a wild tongue? How to carry language? The verbs 'taming' and 'carrying' imply certain dynamics of permission and restriction of movement, and suggest the entanglement between language and the body. The project delves into the notion  of 'tonuge' as an archive: the 'tongue' as a muscle shaped by the physical practice of moving/ talking, having memory; the 'tongue' as a 'cultured' part of the body. It addresses accent as part of our linguistic identity, but also something that defines access or restriction. (From Monika Charkowska's preface to the publication)

Artists: Bianca Hisse, Laura Cemin
Curated by: Monika Charkowska

Texts by: Monika Charkowska, Claire Goodall, Kübra Gümüsay, Bianca Hisse, Laura Cemin
Edited by: Monika Charkowska

Translations: Epp Aareleid (ENG to EST), Ksenia Krimer (ENG to RUS), Keiu Krikmann (ENG to EST), Anita Kodanik (ENG to RUS)
English Proof-Reading: Epp Aareleid
Graphic Design: Kersti Heile

Edition of 200.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.

Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

Ce jeu memory invite à découvrir la symbolique de l’ours à travers l’Histoire, et plus précisément à travers l’histoire de l’ours en peluche. L’animal n’a pas toujours eu bonne réputation chez les humains. Comment un jouet à son effigie a-t-il pu devenir un emblème de l’enfance ? Le jeu se compose de 54 cartes numérotées (27 paires) et d’un poster explicatif imprimés en risographie. 

This game of memory is an invitation to discover the symbolism of the bear through history, more specifically, through the history of the teddy bear. The animal didn’t always have such a good reputation among humans. How could a toy in his likeness become an emblem of childhood ? The game is made of 54 numbered cards (27 pairs), and an explanatory poster printed in risography.

For a long time, Israel and the West, led by Europe and the United States, have used hasbara and neoliberal discourses to hide their colonial plunder of Palestine, while today China and Russia are also whitewashing their own imperialist practices by aligning themselves with authoritarin government and projecting an image of leading resistence to western hegemony. 

This publication analyzes the structural similarities and differences between forced labor and capital exploitation of Palestinians and Uyghurs from left-wing perspective. The author hopes to dispel the myth of campism and call for inter-racial/-ethnic/-national proletarian solidarity against oppression of colonization, capital and totalitarianism. 

In Derek McCormack's home province, farm boys with growing pains enjoy a little-known meal called bed-supper, a hearty bowl of sweet breakfast cereal enjoyed as a midnight snack. Here McCormack has composed a peculiarly salacious bed-supper, where the long secret sweet-tooth of the Marquis de Sade glints as it sinks into the dirtiest of dishes. This useful book will more than stay your appetite until breakfast — Castle Faggot is also a manual of redecoration, a musical, a puppet show, a theory of cosmetics, a work of poetics, and a glorious celebration of the French decadence. — Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

Derek McCormack is a writer who lives in Toronto. His previous books include The Show that Smells and The Well-Dressed Wound (Semiotext(e)).