Reading Room #41: Agency & NICC

Jubilee’s 2025 cycle of Reading Rooms focuses on the book collection of artist Kobe Matthys (1970-2023). For this third reading session Jubilee invites Ariadna Estalella Alba, coordinator of NICC, a non-profit that promotes and critiques knowledge about the development of the artistic practice and the framework within which this takes place. Ariadna proposes a text by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: ‘Cripping the Apocalypse: Some of My Wild Disability Justice Dreams’ from her book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. At Agency’s Praticauthèque, Brussels
19/05/2025, 18-21h

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 May we invite Ariadna Estalella Alba, coordinator of NICC. Ariadna writes:

I wear many hats, and none of them fit perfectly—just enough to get by. And that’s okay, because there’s always plenty to do and even more to think and talk about. One of those hats is my coordinating role at NICC. From that position, one question keeps me going: how can NICC help imagine and build collective futures? That work requires many voices, many bodies, many ways of knowing and living.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha reminds us that everyone should be a worldbuilder, not just a chosen few.

That’s why I propose reading her essay “Cripping the Apocalypse: Some of My Wild Disability Justice Dreams” (entry 7 from Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice). In it, she offers a bold new way of looking at the future. She invites us to center care, relationships, and community—not as extras, but as the foundation of everything. She challenges us to uplift the most marginalized, dismantle oppressive systems, and imagine a world where all of us can thrive, heal, and experience joy.

She’s fierce, and we should be too!

 

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: Agency & NICC

16/06/2025: Reading Room #42: Archipelago of Artistic Practices

 

Practical

Location Reading Room #41:
Agency’s Praticauthèque
Rue Theodore Verhaegenstraat 18
1060 Brussels

Each reading room takes place from 18-21h. 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.