Reading Room #38: Agency

In 2025, Jubilee starts a new cycle of Reading Rooms, now focusing on the book collection of artist Kobe Matthys (1970-2023) at Agency’s Praticauthèque, Brussels
20/01/2025, 18-20:30h

Libraries are research tools of a specialised and subjective nature, but also eminently sustainable and social. Forms and practices of knowledge transfer are always central to Jubilee’s practices. The diverse book collections that exist among and around Jubilee’s members can provide entry points for collective study and exchange. In 2024, we had a Reading Room programme that drew on Fred Dewey’s library. In 2025, we are unlocking the library of the late Kobe Matthys. Kobe was an internationally renowned artist (Agency / Agence / Agentschap), but also an activist, active in permaculture, working member of SOTA and a beloved teacher and mentor of art students at the École de recherche graphique (ERG, Brussels).

A small group of enthusiasts have been keeping the archive and his library alive since Kobe’s passing. With this archive, Kobe created a unique source of knowledge surrounding the history of (intellectual) property rights and, more precisely, the vague and contestable boundaries of authorship, which to this day define the legal context of the arts. But property law also determined the way ‘modern man’ has come to experience, understand, categorise and value the world over the past 300 years and is the basis for modern capitalism, whose catastrophic social, economic and environmental consequences we are increasingly experiencing.

In 2025, Jubilee will fall back on Kobe’s thematically vast library (with an estimated 4000 books, magazines and other titles) for its Reading Rooms. The monthly selection will be a source of relevant conversations, discoveries, and encounters with participants Jubilee did not yet know. This first Reading Room in the new series will be an introduction to Agency’s library.

 

Calendar of Agency Reading Rooms 2025

21/01/2025: Reading Room #38

17/02/2025: Reading Room #39

17/03/2025: Reading Room #40

14/04/2025: Reading Room #41

19/05/2025: Reading Room #42

16/06/2025: Reading Room #43

 

Practical

Location Reading Room #38:
Agency’s Praticauthèque
Rue Theodore Verhaegenstraat 18
1060 Brussels

Each reading room takes place from 18-20:30h. Soup and bites are provided

The Praticauthèque is located on the top floor of the building. There is an elevator. As there is no intercom, there is someone at the door – until 18h. Please be present before that time.