Echoing the theme of this year’s Free School, the festival invited McKenzie Wark to write about the malleability of language. This literary commission follows previous editions from Mirene Arsanios (2023), Otobong Nkanga (2024), and Cecilia Vicuña (2025). Her new text, On Being Plastic, is featured in the festival brochure, available at various locations in Brussels.

Wark is an Australian-born writer, theorist, and professor of Media and Culture at The New School in New York City. She has published numerous groundbreaking theoretical works, including A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard), Gamer Theory (Harvard), and Capital Is Dead (Verso). Her works of autofiction—which include Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte), Raving (Duke) and Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso)—use sexual aesthetics, dissociation, and her own experience as a trans woman as starting points for theorising new models of contemporary living. In Wark’s writing, intellectualism is not an abstract pursuit, but a form of everyday life.

On 14.05, the opening day of the Free School, she will also give a presentation starting from her text On Being Plastic and have a conversation with Luce deLire.