Reading Room #46: Agency & Lactating Bodies

Jubilee’s 2025-26 cycle of Reading Rooms focuses on the book collection of artist Kobe Matthys (1970–2023). For this eighth reading session, Jubilee invites Katya Ev Anton, artist-member of Jubilee and currently presenting the ongoing solo exhibition Lactating Bodies at CC Strombeek. Katya guides us through fragments from Silvia Federici’s Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018), reading the commons through reproductive labour and collective care. This Reading Room is conceived as a hors les murs moment for Lactating Bodies. At Agency’s Praticauthèque, Brussels

This Reading Room has been postponed. 
Next Reading Room: 27/02/2026, 18-20:30h, proposed by Merzedes Sturm-Lie

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 January we invite Katya Ev Anton, artist-member of Jubilee. In the frame of her ongoing solo exhibition Lactating Bodies at CC Strombeek, this Reading Room is conceived as a hors-les-murs moment for the exhibition. Katya guides us through fragments from Silvia Federici’s Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018), opening a discussion on the commons and economies of care.

Federici’s text connects feminist struggle to the organisation of social reproduction and the politics of the commons. Federici writes: “Placing the reproduction of labor power at the center of capitalist production unearths a world of social relations that remains invisible in Marx but is essential to exposing the mechanisms that regulate the exploitation of labor.” In the frame of Lactating Bodies, we’ll read these fragments through lactation as labour, care as infrastructure, and the material conditions of everyday life.

 

Practical 

Location Reading Room #45:
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.

 

Calendar of Agency Reading Rooms 2025-26

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)

19/09/2025: Reading Room #43: Agency & Res Nullius (Wim Cuyvers)

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

12/12/2025: Reading Room #45: Agency & Another Science (Jan Masschelein)

Postponed: Reading Room #46: Agency & Lactating Bodies (Katya Ev Anton)

27/02/2026: Reading Room #47: Agency & the Belly of Brussels (Merzedes Sturm-Lie)