Bebe Books 2024 Calendar is here!
For the 2024 edition, we collabrate with PrintRoom Rotterdam again and invite Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva. Masha writes  "This calendar is not my self-initiated project; the commission and the inspirational impulse to do it certainly came from Bebe Books. However, I accepted their offer without even thinking twice because some of the themes have always been interesting to me. The human body and the fluidity of gender and sexuality are certainly the central ones. I felt that I could experiment with them a lot in my drawings. I've decided to concentrate my attention on longing. Longing to connect with your own body, to play with it and pleasure it, which can come in a myriad of different ways and forms.

I was born and lived a considerable part of my life in Russia, where the ‘international LGBTQ+ movement’ (a ridiculous phrasing by the Russian government) has been officially banned since November 2023. Earlier, in July, gender changes were banned. So, this calendar is also a very political project for me. And it’s painful that, in this day and age, it has to be political."

Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva (she/her) is visual artist and illustrator, currently based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. What she does as a crossover of fine art and illustration. During her career, she worked both as an editorial, and commercial illustrator for publishing houses around the world and as an independent artist for galleries and museums. she is also teaching illustration at WdKA, Rotterdam.

• Riso Printed
  
• 3 colours
• 25 Euros

The project takes a stand on the domestic spaces: aiming to challenge the stigma around domesticity through a queer approach, it explores and tests ways of belonging in urban leftover spaces.

In a changing urban environment, the lines between public and private spaces are becoming less distinct. “Shifting Territories” invites a shared action to reconsider the notion of belonging and space. Using urban natural space as a mediator, we aim to explore the interactions that shape our sense of home, through a series of collective workshops and performative experiences

The event took place in two settings over two days, Saturday 26 August in Aalst and Sunday 27 August in Brussels. Shifting Territories is a project from a joint idea and venture of Every Island and Bebe Books: event programmation by Bebe Books, and installation design by Every Island. Below is a list of artists who performed both days in Aalst and Brussels.

Shifting Territories’ inhabitants:

Nixie, Eddy & Bobby
Cee Fülleman, Make your own lube
Prutsklub, Flower Pounding by Ruud van Moorleghem
Claire Stragier, The Birth of the Dendermaiden in two parts

“If you choose me as your president I will be one who desires to be overthrown again and again like how love has the ability to overthrow & shatte undo the lie that we are discrete individual separated from other discrete individuals”

Says our presidential candidate, Eddie. For this year's IDAHOT, we were invited by the Dutch Embassy in Belgium to celebrate 20 years of same-sex marriage. In response, we posed a question: "What do we want beyond legibility, beyond laws deciding which ways of being and loving are legal?" This led to a speculative presidential campaign where we raised our voices, chanted, sang, and danced around Eddie's speech.

_{Make-up
Friedl Verfroemel
Music
Winter Dieleman: trompet
Bernard Mestdagh: trombone
Robrecht Lasoen: sousafoon
Filipa Bettencourt: clarinet
Luís Melo: clarinet
Emma Amorim: clarinet
Photos
Alice Dooreman}

To our knowledge, this was the first-panel discussion in the world to take place next to a public bathroom door. For the launch of the Toilet zine we invited these architects: Jesse Verdoes, Takuma Johnson, Tuyen Le  and Noam from Bebe Books.

We talked about queering the architectural infrastructure of segregation, namely binary bathrooms at gender-neutral bathroom of Viernulvier Gent

Jesse Verdoes is a spatial designer and researcher from the Netherlands who recently graduated from The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design. Currently, he is working as a researcher and exhibition designer at TU Delft and is co-teaching a course on architectural modeling at The Berlage. 

Takuma Johnson is an architect and spatial designer currently practicing in Rotterdam. A registered architect in the United States, he previously practiced in New York City and Spain, and is a former teaching fellow at Cornell University. 

Tuyen Le is an architectural designer currently pursuing her master's in Architecture at TU Delft. With a Vietnamese upbringing and influences from studying in the U.S., her interest circulates design archeology, decolonization, and post-irony culture.