Reading Room #40: Agence & Notre condition – essai sur le salaire au travail artistique 

Jubilee’s 2025 cycle of Reading Rooms focuses on the book collection of artist Kobe Matthys (1970-2023). For this second reading session Vermeir & Heiremans invite David Aubin, professor Political Science (UCLouvain). He proposes Aurélien Catin’s Notre condition. Essai sur le salaire au travail artistique (Riot Edition, 2020). This reading room will take place in French, facilitation will be possible in English. At Agency’s Praticauthèque, Brussels
14/04/2025, 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 opens up 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.

In April we will be reading a book that was selected by David Aubin. His choice is not only in line with Kobe’s commitment to the art worker status, it is also quite timely now that the Arizona government has found it necessary to once again open up the debate on the social status of artists.

In Notre Condition, an essay on salary for artistic work, Aurélien Catin unveils a whole production of value disguised as passion and love of art. By positioning artists as workers, he goes beyond the realm of culture to enter that of struggle. For him the issue of salary lies at the level of the political relationship that artists maintain with the economic and social structures that determine their activities. At a time of a hardening of capitalism that is reflected in the Uberization of society, and in the takeover of culture and art by corporate foundations and publishing groups, it is time that artistic work is made visible so that artists can emancipate it from the powers of money.

For this Reading Room we’ll be in the best of companies with David Aubin, professor of political science at the School of Political and Social Sciences at UCLouvain. He teaches courses on public policy analysis and evaluation, and is conducting research on the use of expertise and knowledge in the policy process. With him we will address two oppositional positions, namely the struggle for the right to work or the right to subsistence.

 

Calendar of Agency Reading Rooms 2025

20/01/2025: Reading Room #38: Agency

17/03/2025: Reading Room #39: Agency and the Undercommons

14/04/2025: Reading Room #40: Agence & Notre condition

19/05/2025: Reading Room #41

16/06/2025: Reading Room #42

 

Practical

Language Reading Room #40: French, but critical summary in English, and conversation bilingual. English, Dutch and French live-interpretations and explanations can always be arranged.

Location Reading Room #40:
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.