Reading Room #43: Agency & Res Nullius

Jubilee’s 2025 cycle of Reading Rooms focuses on the book collection of artist Kobe Matthys (1970-2023). For this fifth reading session Jubilee invites Wim Cuyvers, former architect, now forester and refuge keeper, long-time researcher of the informal public space, and old friend of Kobe Matthys. In 2025 he published Res Nullius, an artist’s book examining the changing climate and the very definition of architecture through a photographic investigation of the landscape. At Agency’s Praticauthèque, Brussels
19/09/2025, 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 September we invite Wim Cuyvers who selects fragments from Res Nullius, his third artist book published by MASEREEL – centre for contemporary art. The book is about Le Montavoies, the terrain on which Cuyvers has literally and figuratively been working for almost twenty years. The book consists of a collection of 200 landscape photographs, an axonometric perspective of the terrain and a number of texts that accompany the photographs. In the book, Cuyvers further develops the position that architecture is made up of those spaces that lead us outside instead of sheltering interior spaces.

However, a lot has changed in recent years: climate change is having a severe impact on the terrain. Ecological forest management will have to take a very different approach to that followed in the past. Lastly, there is the fact that we are living in a hyperconnected world. Cuyvers argues that the connected condition means that we are always ‘inside’. With this book, he therefore heralds the end of architecture (as he had defined it). Le Montavoies is a danse macabre with the dying medium of the art of space.

In Roman law, res nullius referred to things that belonged to no one and thus could not be appropriated – a notion that resonates with Kobe Matthys’ interests, who called into question the boundaries of ownership, property, and the commons.

 

Calendar of Agency Reading Rooms 2025

20/01/2025: Reading Room #38: Agency (introductory session)

17/03/2025: Reading Room #39: Agency and the Undercommons (Els Silvrants-Barclay)

14/04/2025: Reading Room #40: Agence & Notre condition (David Aubin)

19/05/2025: Reading Room #41: Agency & NICC (Ariadna Estalella Alba)

16/06/2025: Reading Room #42: Archipelago of Artistic Practices (Raphaël Pirenne)

19/10/2025: Reading Room #43: Agency & Res Nullius (Wim Cuyvers)

10/10/2025: Reading Room #44: Law & Magic (Erika Sprey)

 

Practical

Location Reading Room #43:
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.