This festival edition, we would like to propose a book list curated together with rile* bookshop: recommended reading to discover in advance, to read along with the projects of the Free School, or that might become – as Sara Ahmed describes – ‘companion texts’ throughout the whole festival and beyond.

These works allow you to delve deeper into the history of care work, bringing into light how capitalism has always extracted unwaged labour from women and from domestic workers often racialised or with migrant backgrounds. They think of the kitchen as a space of sociality, resistance and memory, performed through objects and instances such as the table, a recipe, a feast. This also invokes a refusal, the possibility of standing up and leaving – being what Sara Ahmed calls a feminist killjoy, by exposing the inequality of what is a ‘happy table’ for some, and economic violence for others. These theorists recast our understanding of bodies and their porosity, showing how food is one of the many things continually connecting us to community, to the earth, and to the systems of labour in our environment.

List of titles

1. At the kitchen table, curated and edited. by Reliable Copy, 2024.

2. Sara Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way, Ed. Seal Press, 2023.

3. Silvia Federici, Beyond The Periphery Of The Skin, 2019 (Ed. PM press)

4. Home Works - A Cooking Book: Recipes for Organising with Art and Domestic Work, Ed. Onomatopee, 2020.

5. To accompany ‘A life worth living: a workshop on struggle, care and joy’ or the Kitchen Talks, you can find a translated introduction to Territorio Domestico’s work on bio-syndicalism here.

All books can be purchased in rile* bookshop (62 Rue des Commerçants, 1000 Brussels) or online via www.rile.space

Bookshop by rile* during the festival
You will be able to find a curated selection by rile* of books for sale at the Festival Centre in KVS BOL, every day from 10 May to 1 June, from 12:00 to 20:00.