michielterpelle.nl

An Account of Dirty Dishes

(1)

By Michiel Terpelle AKA Becky Stabber FKA @jtakajizztaco

October 24, 2025

(Fig. 1.) Meme shared by @freeze_magazine, Instagram, 30 August 2023. Text reads: “Everybody wants to be in a collective but nobody wants to do the dishes.” Screenshot by the author.

This account of dirty dishes is written during the Jan van Eyck Academie residency in 2025, describing a dispute that emerged as a consequence of the research conducted there by the Bebe Books collective. However, the preconditions for that conflict were forged in the years prior. To understand the emergence of a class consciousness among workers within the Bebe Books collective, it is essential to examine a pivotal document: an email sent by Mert Şen—one of the co-founders of the collective. This lengthy message attempted to contextualize a wave of departures—including those of three core members earlier that year—by framing the conflict as a story of individual unreliability and leadership failure. Yet, the email inadvertently exposed a far deeper schism, revealing a fundamental clash between the collective’s publicly proclaimed ethos and its internal, unspoken hierarchies, setting the stage for the confrontations to come.

Contradiction before the crisis

The email that made our structure visible

On 28 September 2024, Mert addressed the remaining members of the collective in an email that would become a key document in our history. Triggered by an interpersonal signal—Noam Youngrak Son, one of the early members of the collective, unfollowing him on Instagram—Mert used the message to contextualize, from his perspective, the “sequence of events” that led to the departure of several members, most notably one prominent figure. On the surface, the email narrates a conflict centered on individual accountability and reliability.

However, this email represents more than just a list of grievances. It marks a point where a deeper, underlying tension within our collective was forced into the open. The specific incidents Mert details—failed projects, broken commitments, and interpersonal friction—are symptoms of a fundamental divide. The core conflict that emerges is a clash between two incompatible models of organization. On one side is Mert’s implicit framework, which is hierarchical, client-focused, and operates on a logic of clear roles and managerial accountability. On the other is the model embodied by another prominent member—and tacitly enabled by the founders’ passivity—which is fluid, personally-driven, and resistant to formal structure.

Ultimately, Mert’s email stands as a stark indictment of the collective’s failure to share a single, operational self-definition. His detailed accounting of labor and consequences unintentionally exposes that he was operating with the mindset of a small business or design studio, seeing himself as the custodian of its operational integrity. The friction he laments was the inevitable result of this framework colliding with a group that lacked a shared, explicit agreement on its own structure and values. It is crucial to note, however, that the email represents only Mert’s interpretation of this lack of definition. As the collective’s public-facing manifestos and the subsequent responses from other members would demonstrate, there were numerous, competing instances that defined the collective in ways fundamentally opposed to his managerial interpretation.

The exchange of emails marks a critical juncture in the history of our collective, crystallizing a long-simmering debate over its very nature and purpose. Mert’s initial missive framed the conflict through a lens of individual accountability and operational failure, portraying the collective as a fragile enterprise jeopardized by unreliability and a lack of formal oversight. This perspective, however, was met with a fundamental recalibration in the responses from Noam and Michiel Terpelle—the collective’s most recent member. Noam deftly shifted the focus from individual culpability to a “structural inability” to collaborate, emphasizing that the core issue was not dirty dishes, but the absence of a shared practice for washing them. The response of Michiel, in contrast, represented a different, yet equally problematic, pole of the collective’s confusion: by defining the group as a “pressure cooker” and a “chosen family,” they articulated a vision where the primary function was relational and restorative, a common but precarious queer model that often fails to account for labor and institutional reality. This discursive clash—between a model of managerial accountability and one of unstructured relational care—revealed that the collective’s central conflict was not about personnel, but about a fundamental lack of a shared organizational paradigm. Consequently, the upcoming Jan van Eyck residency was repositioned not merely as a creative opportunity, but as an essential, privileged space to finally build a structure that could honor this complex, collective ambition.

The theoretical clash over organizational models, so starkly outlined in the September emails, materialized with unambiguous clarity in October 2024 during a dispute over the Bebe Magazine colophon. Mert’s unilateral decision to re-categorize the collective into “Founders” and “Team” was a performative enactment of the implicit hierarchy he had always espoused. His justification—leaning on legal responsibility and founding roles—exposed a core assumption that formal, institutional authority (who applied for funds, who is legally bound) should dictate internal status and credit, overriding the collective’s ethos of flat structure. In contrast, Michiel’s objection, “you leave me and Noam out of the collective this way,” revealed an assumption that contribution and belonging should be the primary metrics of membership, not founding moments or legal documents. The discussion became a semantic battleground, with Mert advocating for “Team” as a collaborative term while simultaneously using it to create a tiered system, and Michiel defending “members” as a term denoting equal belonging. Ultimately, Mert’s repeated action of marking the issue as “resolved” despite ongoing dissent served as the ultimate metaphor for his managerial approach: a unilateral assertion of closure that, in practice, only deepened the fundamental conflict over who truly holds the power to define the collective’s identity.

Two collectives: the public myth and the legal reality

While internal communications revealed a collective struggling to define its operational model, its carefully curated public presentation told a remarkably consistent and ambitious story. Externally, across numerous institutional websites, Bebe Books projected a unified identity built on a powerful theoretical foundation. The frequent invocation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “narrative of the arrow or spear” served as a public manifesto, explicitly rejecting the “singular heroic designer” in favor of a collaborative, multi-voiced methodology. This was consistently paired with a definition of queerness not just as identity, but as a deliberate practice—a methodology for creating contexts where marginalized experiences could be represented. The public-facing narrative was one of shared agency, creative labor, care, and friendship, presenting the collective as a seamless, holistic experiment in non-hierarchical making.

This stands in pointed contrast to the legal identity laid out in its statutes as a non-profit organization (VZW). The statutes frame the collective’s purpose in pragmatic, supportive terms: to “support and promote” queer artists and to “provide a platform” for the LGBTQ+ community. The language shifts from a radical, methodological critique of authorship to a more conventional institutional role of providing “logistical, financial, artistic... support and guidance.” This legal scaffolding establishes a necessary, formal structure but operates on a different register—one of facilitation and umbrella support. Although the VZW’s board included external members, Mert and Ruud van Moorleghem—another co-founder—functioned as its de facto leadership, wielding the legal structure to create an unaccountable hierarchy between themselves (as the “founders”) and the constituents it serves.

The tension, therefore, is not a lack of a stated identity, but a chasm between the high-theory, anti-hierarchical narrative sold to the public and the grants committee (and to its members), and the on-the-ground reality where the legal form was wielded as a tool of exclusion by a de facto owner class. The collective knew what it wanted to be—a spear-scattering multitude—but its legal form and, as the conflicts show, its internal practices, defaulted to the very “arrow” of singular decision-making and founder-centric authority it publicly sought to dismantle. The external presentation was a declaration of intent; the internal strife was the failure to build a vessel capable of fulfilling it.

The residency as experimental laboratory

The dishwasher as method

During our residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie, we sought to confront the imbalances of power, ownership, and responsibility that were embedded in Bebe Books’ collective infrastructure. Our aim, as stated in our proposal,(2) was to develop practices of commoning that could redistribute labor, resources, and attribution more equitably. This research was framed by a central, guiding metaphor drawn from our application: the challenge of “doing the dishes together”—a commitment to move beyond the conviviality of shared dinners and confront the gritty, often invisible labor required to sustain a collective. This work took shape in concrete forms: we mapped funding structures, designed proposals for a shared wiki, and diagrammed models of collective attribution. However, rather than working through these issues, our collaboration at the residency revealed how deeply entrenched and resistant to change the founders were. The very proposals we generated for co-ownership and transparency were systematically foreclosed. Instead of accountability and redistribution, we witnessed the reproduction of harmful collective structures: opacity around decision-making, the centralization of authority, and practices that silenced or retaliated against members who raised concerns.

These conditions created an environment where the power imbalance could no longer be contained within theoretical debate. This was crystallized in specific interactions, including a pivotal, unresolved conflict with Mert that we were compelled to formally report. This escalation underscored how fragile our attempts at commoning became when power was consolidated rather than shared, revealing that the core conflict was not just about ideas but about the very safety and integrity of the collaborative space. In this sense, our research not only mapped potential models of collectivity but also exposed the lived contradictions, failures, and risks that emerge when collectives do not practice accountability.

Narrative control and the question of representation

The conflict began when the Jan van Eyck Academie asked us to submit a short biography of our collective for the Open Studios. Noam drafted the text, but the founders rejected it, citing issues of style and accessibility. While the initial exchange was polite, the discussion quickly revealed deeper disagreements about authorship, ownership of the collective’s narrative, and what kind of language should represent Bebe Books.

In response, we opened a shared document as a space for collective dialogue. It began as a revision process, but soon expanded into a broader reflection: members wrote about our roles, grievances, and differing approaches to collaboration. The document became, in effect, a live diagram of our collective tensions, making visible disparities in labor, narrative control, and emotional responsibility.

Institutionalization of conflict

The threshold of institutional violence

This dialogue came to an abrupt end when Mert published a response directed at Michiel, an exchange we formally reported as a breach of the Jan van Eyck Code of Conduct. The Academie’s reaction was immediate and defining: they asserted their position as the sole arbiter of institutional truth, dismissing our collective judgment as unofficial. This decision actively disenfranchised us rather than being a neutral act of procedure.

We were effectively treated as workers without citizenship—present in the space but stripped of the agency to define the terms of our own safety. The institution’s insistence on a prolonged debate over whether the harm ‘counted’ was a tactical delay that protected the status quo. This moment crystallized the fragility of our project: the shared space meant to foster dialogue instead revealed and reinforced the very hierarchies we sought to dismantle. After this, non-founding members no longer felt safe engaging in informal conversation with the founders, marking the beginning of a new rupture in the collective.

When this incident of verbal aggression occurred, the question of how to acknowledge harm became central to Noam’s and Michiel’s attempts at mediation. A draft letter was prepared naming the incident explicitly and linking it to the Jan van Eyck Code of Conduct. The founders refused to endorse the letter unless these references were removed. This disagreement exposed a deeper structural divide: for non-founding members, acknowledgment of harm was a necessary precondition for accountability, while for the founders, preserving the collective’s image took precedence over transparency.

In the aftermath, non-founding members shouldered the practical and emotional labor of proposing ways forward—whether through reform based on acknowledgment or through a transparent dissolution of the collective. While the founders’ response acknowledged the effort behind these proposals, it effectively deferred any substantive engagement with their content. What might have been a moment of constructive mediation instead revealed how unevenly responsibility and vulnerability were distributed within the collective, and how the refusal to immediately name and address the harm foreclosed the possibility of genuine resolution.

Meanwhile, the founders independently requested a meeting with the Jan van Eyck director without informing us or seeking our consent. This move excluded the non-founding members from the process and ignored our clearly stated condition: that any mediation must begin with an acknowledgment of harm. By presenting themselves as speaking for the collective, while erasing the central issue at stake, they undermined both trust and the possibility of genuine repair.

In response, we reiterated two clear paths forward, making accountability a non-negotiable precondition:

Option A: Collaborative Work Toward a True Commons.

Option B: A Benign and Generous Dissolution.

The founders refused to engage with these proposals, remaining silent even as we carried the burden of formulating alternatives. Their actions left us no choice but to escalate the matter through a formal report.

Two days later, we submitted the formal report to the Jan van Eyck directors, the confidential advisor, and informed an external integrity officer. In it, we documented the incident of verbal aggression, attached the original conversation for transparency, and detailed how the remarks violated multiple clauses of the Academie’s Code of Conduct—including those on aggression, bullying, and respect.

We emphasized that this was not an isolated moment, but symptomatic of deeper structural issues: the centralization of authorship and infrastructure in the hands of the founders, the repeated dismissal of proposals for shared stewardship, and the silencing or departure of multiple members before us. The pattern of denial and gaslighting that followed, which exacerbated the harm, was just as much at risk as our actual experience of verbal aggression.

To prevent further deterioration, we proposed two clear pathways forward: (A) a mediated process toward genuine commoning, beginning with acknowledgment of the harm; or (B) a careful dissolution of the collective, documented as a resource for future collectivities. In either case, accountability had to be the starting point. We asked the Academie to uphold its Code of Conduct and intervene to support a safe, respectful working environment.

Infrastructure as a weapon

Following the report of verbal aggression and our call for intervention, the founders initiated a campaign of exclusion that effectively locked us out of the collective’s shared infrastructures.

Their first step was physical: a unilateral request for a separate studio space at the Jan van Eyck Academie, isolating themselves and cutting off informal dialogue. This was soon extended to the digital sphere: our access to the collective Dropbox—containing years of shared research, archives, and ongoing projects—was revoked without discussion. What had been built as a commons through collective labor was suddenly privatized, stripping us of our own work and the ability to continue our practice.

Exclusion quickly spread to professional channels. We were cut off from collective email addresses, blocked from Instagram, and excluded from communications with collaborators. In several cases, we only learned of new projects or invitations involving Bebe Books through external contacts. These opportunities, addressed to the collective as a whole, were appropriated by the founders acting alone. The symbolic and material capital of Bebe Books was mobilized in their names, while our participation was erased.

This lockout unfolded even as a moratorium on public activities had been agreed in principle ahead of the mediation. Yet while we abided by the suspension, the founders continued to present themselves publicly as Bebe Books, including in new collaborations and external events. Breaches of the moratorium were documented and reported to the Academie, yet the institution consistently declined to intervene, deferring all responsibility to the upcoming mediation process.

What emerged was a comprehensive disenfranchisement across physical, digital, professional, and social domains. Exclusion became not just a symptom of conflict but a deliberate strategy: consolidating control over the collective’s infrastructures, silencing dissenting members, and converting a shared practice into private property. The Academie repeatedly deferred to its own future judgement on whether the Code of Conduct had been violated, and declined to enforce the moratorium in the meantime. This stance effectively entrenched the asymmetry, as we were left without any institutional recourse while exclusionary practices continued unchecked.

Mediation and its limits

The mediation apparatus

The path to formal mediation was long and fraught with delays, creating an extended period of silence and tension between the founders and the workers. After the founders moved into a new studio in mid-June, the process officially began on 10 September 2025. The delays stemmed from two factors: the rejection of several proposed mediators (one for participating in blackface, another at the founders’ request) and the interruption of the summer break. A third mediator was finally accepted under pressure from the Jan van Eyck directors, who indicated this would be their final attempt to facilitate an agreement.

Entering the mediation, we were already in a compromised position. The term “voluntary” felt like a gag when the entire legal, digital, and financial collective infrastructure remained exclusively under the founders’ control. The stakes were the very terms of our membership: continued access to shared resources, the potential for an equitable new agreement, or the threat of being locked out entirely. We were expected to negotiate from a position of profound disenfranchisement, a process that seemed less about restoring balance and more about institutional pressure to “make up.”

The mediation itself remains confidential, and its substance cannot be disclosed here. However, one action during this period was a public and definitive breach of its spirit: after storming out of a mediation session, Mert unilaterally deleted our primary professional email addresses (michiel@bebebooks.be and noam@bebebooks.be) from outside the room. This was not a detail from the confidential discussion, but an observable, external act. It was a deliberate move to sever a critical communication channel, disrupt the process from which he had just withdrawn, and further isolate us from collaborators and the Jan van Eyck community.

Following the unsuccessful mediation, the academy confirmed the collective’s separation into distinct residencies. Their communication included a stark warning, urging “caution and restraint” in any public presentations or communications and explicitly threatening expulsion for any naming of parties that could be perceived as “negative or harmful.”

Complaint, counter-archive, and institutional language

In response to this, and to ensure a complete record for the upcoming complaint procedure, we submitted a formal addendum detailing the systematic disenfranchisement we had endured. This document catalogued a pattern of breaches of the academy’s Code of Conduct by the founders, including:

Citing the previously described moment of aggression, which created an unsafe and intimidating studio environment. Documenting the structural intimidation through physical isolation (the separate studio), digital lockout (revoking access to Dropbox, blocking on Instagram, deleting our email addresses), and professional sabotage (erasing our contributions from the website and social media). Arguing that the cumulative effect of these actions—including silencing dissent and gaslighting—constituted a hostile work environment. And highlighting the profound disrespect and lack of good fellowship, particularly the instrumentalization of our queer and trans identities for the collective’s external image while systematically dismissing our agency and concerns internally.

This formal complaint was our attempt to translate the lived experience of power imbalance and systemic exclusion into a language the institution was obligated to recognize, moving the conflict from a private dispute to a matter of institutional accountability.

Unionization as structural response

From collective to class

The institutional impasse and the escalating conflicts necessitated a radical re-evaluation of our position, a process that unfolded concurrently with the mediation. The conceptual framework of the residency—“doing the dishes together”—was being tested in real-time and was proving impossible in a structure where one party controlled the kitchen and could unilaterally change the locks. It was during this period of confrontation, even before the mediation had formally concluded in failure, that our understanding of the struggle crystallized: this was not merely interpersonal but structural, a classic conflict between ownership and labor unfolding within the purported sanctuary of a queer collective. In response, the idea of a union began to take shape as a necessary form of organization. This conceptualization was not a linear outcome but a parallel development—a theory of change being forged in the fire of ongoing dispute.

The Queer Collective Workers’ Union

The first iteration of this effort was the “Bebe Books Workers’ Union,” a name that directly confronted the power dynamic at play. However, to avoid legal challenges over the trademarked name “Bebe Books,” held by the VZW under Ruud van Moorleghem’s stewardship, we reconstituted the group under the broader, more protective banner of the Queer Collective Workers’ Union (QCWU). This was not a retreat but a strategic expansion, framing our specific struggle as part of a wider phenomenon of exploitation within queer cultural production.

On 28 August, we formally introduced the QCWU to the Jan van Eyck for the Open Studios. Our statement positioned the union as a direct consequence of the contradictions within Bebe Books, “which [we] argue contradicts its public framing as a collective.” We announced our intent to “reframe the collective’s operation through the lens of labor,” exposing how the “representation of queer collectivity, and the precarious labor of members, has been extracted for the accumulation of symbolic capital.” This public declaration was our first act of reclamation.

For the Open Studios public program, we proposed an action titled “Unionization as Negativity in the Time of Speculation.” This framed our move not as a nostalgic bid for solidarity but as a symbolic strike—an active inscription and counter-archive that refused the erasure of our labor. It was a method of making visible the exploitation that had been systematically silenced.

Crucially, the union was conceived not just for ourselves, but for all who had been alienated by the collective’s structure. We reached out to former members, interns, and constituents, including the other prominent member, acknowledging that the “structural imbalance that many of us experienced in the past reappeared.” In our email, we explicitly stated that the QCWU “represents all current and former members of Bebe Books who have contributed to its making,” and that it was “a recognition that this organization already belongs to [them].” This was an attempt to build a coalition of the dispossessed, transforming individual experiences of exclusion into a collective narrative of solidarity and resistance. The union was no longer a proposal, but it was a lived response, a new infrastructure built from the ashes of the old.

Aftermath and legacy

Designing the dishwasher (an infrastructure after the breakdown)

What ultimately crystallized through the friction of these events was not merely an answer, but a far more complex and demanding set of questions. The interpersonal harm we experienced was undeniable, yet we came to understand it as a symptom of a deeper, structural condition: the fundamental asymmetry of ownership over the narrative, the infrastructure, and the means of production within the collective. The founders operated as owners, while we were relegated to workers—our labor and queer identities extracted for capital and visibility without reciprocal control.

However, to frame this solely as a conflict would be to erase the profound, generative work it necessitated. Our residency became a forge. In direct response to the obstructions, refusals, and delays we faced, we were compelled to build—not just oppose. We conceptualized multiple versions of a “dishwasher”: detailed diagrams, theoretical frameworks, and the very structure of the Queer Collective Workers’ Union itself. These were not abstract exercises, but concrete proposals for alternative infrastructures, born from the exhausting but essential labor of collective transformation. The residency, therefore, revealed a dual reality: the stark violence of entrenched power, and the potent, creative necessity of organizing against it. We did not just experience a breakdown; we engineered a breakthrough, proving that the most critical design work often begins not at the drawing board, but at the breaking point.

Notes

(1) This account by Michiel Terpelle (AKA Becky Stabber) is necessarily written from the perspective of the workers who formed the Queer Collective Workers’ Union. While we have strived for accuracy, positionality shapes this narrative. We present it not as an omniscient history, but as a testimony from within the struggle, a crucial counter-archive to the founders’ narrative of control. The evidence we present—emails, unilateral actions, lockouts—stands as a material witness to our claims.

(2) Bebe Books, et al. On Doing Dishes Together. 2024.