Framed as a love message, Zie says I love you acts like a pirate intervention — a gentle disruption strategy within the field of typographic design. By slipping zie neo-pronoun, the project challenges the supposed neutrality of language, revealing the cultural and political norms embedded within it.

With a touch of humor and kitsch, echoing a well-known French sentimental ballad, Zie says I love you (iel te dit je t’aime, in French) reasserts the existence of identities too often erased, making visible the emotional and political charge carried by language.

Skunk Pudding — two words among many — appears lettered in a sketchbook by Leigh Bowery, the queer performer and iconic figure of camp who blended fashion, performance, and subversion. In these few pages from 1993, displayed under glass during Bowery’s retrospective at Tate Modern in the summer of 2025, Bowery gathered clusters of words, potential song titles. Among them: Skunk and Pudding, two terms that seem, at first glance, utterly incompatible. Brought together, they create a grotesque substance, twisting the insult “You skunk!”.

The Skunk Pudding typeface [ongoing], designed by Camille Circlude, draws on this very energy — not as a faithful reproduction of Bowery’s unmistakable hand-lettering, but as a personal translation of his force into a typeface with a plump, shaky, imperfect aesthetic. Skunk Pudding incorporates post-binary ligatures that engage with issues of gender representation, seeking, like Bowery, to resist the hegemony of the straight and the normative.

Through typography, Skunk Pudding extends an unfinished gesture: that of an artist struck by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, who used fashion, makeup, and the grotesque as tools of resistance and liberation.