Les Étaques
independent publishing collective


Jan Paremski & Bonaventure Rosa

Jan Paremski is a social worker. Bonaventure Rosa teaches history and geography. Their approach, poetical and political, has crossed the one of Les Étaques en 2015. They chose to tell the story of Lille-Sud and its inhabitants.

here the sea is no more

Lille-Sud has no other name than the one of a direction. This poor neighborhood of 23000 inhabitants is a genuine urban enclave. Separated from the city by the highway, it has become the playground of real estate profiteers and big urban projects.

Bonaventure Rosa et Jan Paremski explore the memory of the neighborhood and of its inhabitants, redraw trajectories, probe spaces. Inspired by encounters, immersions and testimonies, here the sea is no more gives a name to a social reality that still shapes several generations.


Thomas B. Yahi

Adopted lillois, Thomas B. Yahi hangs out in archive's rooms and the tails of demonstrations. After having written for a decade in the alternative press, he signs here his first novel. This story originates in events that have taken place in the early 2000 and which imbued the author's journey.

his arabic face

The graffiti was as well the raw material than the product of our friendship. Without this, how could we have become those inseparable? How could we have crossed boundaries ? He had grown up in the north, me in the south. He lived in a poor neighborhood, me in a rather opulent city. He had no degrees, i did. His father had allways been absent, mine was pressuring me to study. I am white, he was wearing « his arabic face ».

This first novel of Thomas B. Yahi is a fictional and political portrait of two youths from Lille in the years 2000. Mirror games between the trajectories of Khalil and Bastien, this story of friendship witnesses the borders that each protagonist tries in his own way to cross until their lethal separation a night of october 2005.


Antonio Delfini & Rafaël Snoriguzzi

Antonio Delfini and Rafaël Snoriguzzi have met while working for the newspaper of social critic La Brique.
Implied in the struggles for housing rights through the l’Atelier Populaire d’Urbanisme de Fives, Antonio Delfini has also contributed to the writing of the book Sociologie de Lille, published by the éditions La Découverte (2017).

against euralille

a critic of the metropolitan utopia

Third largest business district of France, Euralille embodies the arrival of Lille in the enchanted world of european big cities. We can blame those land promoters to not only have given birth to one of the ugliest urban projects of its time, but also to have conceived an oppressive architecture, abolished political cleavage and transformed the city into a commodity.

Beyond the political stories that scar an old working-class land, against euralille puts on trial the metropolitan utopia which rules nowadays in Paris, Lyon, Marseille or Toulouse, so that the cities stop being designed by economical flows but rather by the needs of their inhabitants.


Julien Talpin

Julien Talpin is a sociologist and a researcher working for the CNRS. Specialist of the politicisation of popular neighborhoods, he is notably the author of Community Organizing. De l’émeute à l’alliance des classes populaires aux États-Unis (Raisons d’Agir, 2016). With Marwan Mohammed, he has co-directed the book Communautarisme ? (Presses Universitaires de France, 2018).

muzzling neighborhoods

how the power suppresses popular mobilizations

Why popular neighborhoods are not rebelling more often? While they are destroyed since decades by low-cost urbanism, mass unemployment, and police humiliations, Julien Talpin explores the reasons why they seem to experience difficulties to defend their interests. He shows that the obstacles in front of collective mobilizations are less due to what would be the fatalistic apathy of their inhabitants than to the multiple repressive tactics used by the power in place.

The different chapters break down the disciplinary logics which, without even having the need to be coordinated, ensure the maintenance of the statu quo. Behind the repression of the police and the justice are deployed on a daily basis corporatist blackmailing to public subsidies, islamophobic disqualification of opponents, or the anesthetic shots of participatory democracy.

By documenting the way this low noise repression crosses contemporary mobilizations, this book exposes its systemic dimension. It puts the light on this revolt trap which manufactures political domestication, enhances collective self-censorship and generates individual demission. By delivering the recipy of the adversary, it contributes to the long path of the autonomous struggles for equality.


Fabien Drouet

Fabien Drouet lives from small jobs in the region of Lyon. He regularly publishes texts in poetry reviews such as Métèque, Chats de mars, Realpoetik as well as he makes music (Antidaté). In 2016, he self-publishes a first collection about his path, entitled Vive l’hôpital public. In 2017 et 2018, he successively founds two poetical reviews that he still runs today : La Terrasse et 21 Minutes.

out of here

Between those pages, a man tells his story and opens his heart. His writing is as well the barometer of the pressure exercised by his psyche than the social violence crossed in the streets and pubs where he is frequently found. From those unpredictable existencial oscillations and encounters, the author brings to us a singular writing, a fragile prose and finely chopped, free verses with an only apparent softness.

Fabien Drouet gifts us with suspended moments : « I slowly cancel myself », « the triumph is for cowards », « I am not only because i am not dead ». Remains the sublimation of the words to catalog the dreams, to distill the beauty of moments, to transcend the absences, to look for poetry not in a rime but in places, in moments.


Antonin Richard

With a B.T.S. (Brevet de Technicien Superieur) in the audiovisual sector and a bachelor degree in journalism Antonin Richard was not seeking to become a sea-rescuer. It is through the making of documentary movies that his political conscience an his need to act have been stimulated. He collaborates with the cooperative « Les Mutins de Pangée », participates to the re-publishing of Afrique 50 from René Vautier ‒ first anticolonial french movie ‒, the editing of Une histoire populaire des États-Unis from Olivier Azam and Daniel Mermet, and to the shooting of Merci Patron ! de François Ruffin.
Antonin subscribes to the « cinéma d’intervention sociale » thought by René Vautier, which implies to « act on the developement of reality, until it is transformed ». In this state of mind and with the collective of women of the roma community from Hellemmes-Ronchin, he shoots the documentary Nos poumons c’est du béton which condemns their life conditions on a vacant lot of the metropolis of Lille.
In 2016, Antonin let go of his camera and goes to Lesbos with Greenpeace's activists to take part in the life-rescueing activities organized at sea. He joins the rescue team of Médecins sans frontières, then boards as a sea-rescuer on several ships of N.G.O such as (Sea-Watch, MSF, SOS Méditerranée) offshore of the Libyan coast. He participates in the technical preparation of the Ocean Viking in 2019 and, more recently, to the one of the Louise Michel in 2020.

this morning the sea is calm

diary of a sea-rescuer in the mediterranean

The sea is a mirror that is only troubled by our bow. The sky is clouded but the light is strong. The atmosphere has something of a metallic grey. We are going for our last rescue before heading back to the north. I am feeling tense, my head filled with all the « what if… » that i can imagine after the days we have lived. We put the small rafts in the water. When we approach, the tension is palpable , the people ask us if we are the police. We quickly say to them « We are here to help you ». Our « guests » are full of life, and without knowing it, they reignite our motivation. Some members of the crew say that we are not saving them, but that it is them who are saving us.

Through the story of his rescuing experiences in the mediterranean sea, Antonin Richard takes us on a trip where the demagogy of european politics merge with the police of dictatorial regimes. Also where those who support marine friendship are on a daily basis taming the sea – and on the move to let the right to the people who migrate to give themselves a present and a future.


Caroline Cranskens

Caroline Cranskens is the author of collections Devant la machine (2013) and Gypsy Blues (2014) published by Les Venterniers and the collection Le Trou derrière la tête (2017) published by À Verse. She has also signed Passage à l’acte in the book-movie Arabat published in 2019 by the éditions isabelle sauvage.

fundus of the eye

«What rings to the ear

It is the frightful inscription

Of your body

Into the machine-jaw

Of an inexistent world»

Fundus of the eye
describes a dying world through fantastic visions where all colors explode and vanish into the dark. In the vein of the triptychs of Jérôme Bosch, the street art, or the spoken word, this writing "open to the eye" shakes your guts and scratches walls. Beyond the esthetical and political gesture, this is the primal scream of a woman which thunders.

Caroline Cranskens writes to come out of the shadow and take shape «to be done with the white mirror». She faces the language, its laws and its jailers. First by unscrewing the « dead words ». Then by regaining sounds and letters. Finally by letting live a visceral tongue, a razor tongue, a barbaric tongue. The author digs through the flawed base of the language of power and order, masculine and secured. Through the cracks she injects the « fury words » of a raging and free poetry where « everything is closer to the edge ».


Journal La Brique

La Brique is a militant newspaper from Lille created in 2007, self-financing and managed horizontally, which defends a vision of journalism going against the one of dominant media. Its collective claims to fight against all forms of domination, and struggles against the invasion of our spaces by the capital. Its ambition is to provide a solid and high-quality content to develop social critic and counter-culture. The newspaper is published every three month and is only conceived by militant volunteers.

without ads and pitiless

chronicles of la brique, free and independent newspaper in lille

In the shadow of the daily news mediocrity grow alternative newspapers often unknown from a large public. Facing news companies more interested by profits rather than information, those newspapers claim editorial freedom, financial independence and are distinguished often by an horizontal organization and a strong thinking about journalistic writing.
Their format fluctuate from a magazine to a newspaper and their frequency of publication can as well be monthly or annually. Their financial stabililty relies only on their readers and the direct sells they make in kiosks.All of them suggest another way of thinking the world, of doing politics together, and criticize vividly the mass media speeches.
This book is a non exhaustive descent into the work of the newspaper from Lille La Brique, which defies since numerous years the socialist power established in this northern city, claiming a free press « Without ads & pitiless ».


Julia Galaski

Graduated in political science, Julia Galaski works in the socio-cultural sector of Brussels and campaigns in different collectives for the defense of human rights and social justice.

the passport

« It has been more than a year that i have an israelian passport. One year ago, i was sure i was going to give it back. But we do not give back a passport because we are outraged by a political line, even if it becomes more outrageous, that it goes against our values, our convictions, that it generates hatred, that it stirs up tensions in the heart of your own family. This passport, i did not choose it. Nor the french or the german passport, that it would not come to my mind to give back. I do not know what to do with this piece of paper, with even this idea of nation, that assigns us to a land, to an identity, to a national story. But wether i like it or not, this passport shapes my relationship to borders, to history, to others, and how they look at me. »

Born in Brussels, from a french-israeli father, and a german mother, the narrator goes to the middle-east then maghreb to follow the tracks of her paternal history. The unexpected acquisition of an israelian passport disrupts her aspirations. How to handle the nationality of a country at war that ignites the hostility of her friends? How this passport affects her relationship to the world an to others? From Jerusalem to Ramallah, from Cairo to Algiers, from Rabat to Paris, the passport questions our relationship to History, to borders, to languages and memories, to national identities and family links. This story of a learning experience questions our way of inhabiting the world, of thinking it and acting in it.


Aboubakar Soumahoro

Arrived from Ivory Coast at the age of 19 years old, Aboubakar Soumahoro has become a leading political actor of the italian polical landscape.. He is one of the founders of the Coalition internationale des Sans-Papiers et des Migrants.

humanity revolting

our struggle for work and the right to happiness

« We wanted to collect unused and abandoned panels and metal sheet plates to fix our house in the campsite. While Sacko and me were on the roof of a structure collecting panels, i heard a gunshot that alerted us and forced us to go down immediately. Having identified the source of the gunshot, i noticed far away a man, on higher ground, who was looking at us, his shotgun pointed at us. »

In this essay mixing political thoughts, and stories of his life, Aboubakar Soumahoro analyses the era since his experience as an immigrant farm worker in the south of Italia. While work is more and more precarious, the migrant workers seem to be the most vulnerables. The author invites us to see the struggle of immigrants with their specificities, but above all, to consider it like a more global struggle against all forms of oppression, at the crossroads of class issues, of race and gender. Against a racially oriented vision of the world, which demeans the dignity of those who are only seen as « migrants », he cites Albert Camus to promote a « right to happiness » with an universal range.


Antoine Guironnet

Antoine Guironnet is a researcher in the Centre d’études européennes et de politique comparée de Sciences Po. Spécialist of the financialization of urban capitalism, he has among other things contributed to the joint publication Le Capital dans la cité. Une encyclopédie critique de la ville published by the éditions Amsterdam (2020).

in the market of metropolises

investigation on the urban power of finance

Each year the who's who of urbanism gathers itself in Cannes for the largest trade fair of real estate of the world. Just a few months before the movie stars, english promoters, american pension funds, japanese architects, and elected representatives of french metropolises climb up the steps of the Palais des festivals.

But being true to the market that it embodies, the fair trade first and foremost roll out the red carpet for major investors to whom real estate is only a financial investment. Diving into the alleys and backstages of the Marché international des professionnels de l’immobilier (MIPIM), to the market of metropolises gives to see how the financialization of the city is played through the « accreditation » of territories by the investors.

This inquiry conducted between Cannes, Paris, London and Lyon unveil the role played by the finance in the transformation of entire areas of our cities. It provides a unique contribution to the critic of the machinery in which the capital extends its power on our everyday life.


Lë Agary

Stealthy during the day, surreptitious at night Lë Agary writes most of the time the morning whilst listening to massive sound. It will be dealt with us is his first novel.

it will be necessary to do with us

« We are only two, he watches my back, i have not memorized his first name, it is better like this. The blades of the bolt-cutter go deep in the rubber with an encouraging ease. There are five pump nozzles, there is ten numbers, i am here for at least eight minutes, shiiiit. The headscarf does not hold, i do not have the time to adjust it, i am counting on my peaked cap and my head down. It is long eight minutes when something in you tells you to flee from the first second. My ears are open, if he whistles, i go straight for the dump where a bike is waiting for me on the other side. »

It will be necessary to do with us is a sabotage handbook disguised in a novel or, rather, a novel disguised in a sabotage handbook. It takes us on a journey in the steps and thoughts of an activist, who every day, struggles on many fronts to overthrow a world personified by Frank. One day trader, the next security guard, commissioner or simple soldier with a tonfa, he embodies the cynicism of capitalism and the violence of its security service. In mirror of the state's repression, Lë Agary plunges us into the tenacious enthusiasm of the revolt against injustice and those causing it. Facing media stereotypes that disqualify activism, it will be dealt with us restores to us the generous spontaneity of those who want to shake up the social order and in the mean time form audacious collectives.