In 1976, Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig published their Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes. Through a renewed relationship with language—using unexpected feminized turns of phrase (“cadavres exquises,” “animales,” etc.), shifts in meaning, and even linguistic inventions—they unfolded a mythical world of Amazons, an entire lesbian civilization with its own rituals, memories, and gestures.
Founded in 2018, Bye Bye Binary, a collective for typographic research and creation, likewise seeks to open new narratives within written language: the reinvention of slogan·es, the hacking of grammar, post-gender ligatures, and more. This year, the collective was invited to celebrate Wittig by creating a series of flags installed in the Bétonsalon space for the closing of the program Cap pour l’île des vivantxs.
As an activation, the workshop “toutes pratiques agréables en bouche” (“all practices pleasing to the tongue”) offers an afternoon of reflection and creation around the graphic and iconographic forms language can take—especially our feminist, queer, unruly, and unpolished languages.