Jubilee–platform for artistic research

Reading Room #47: Agency & the Belly of Brussels

Jubilee’s 2025-26 cycle of Reading Rooms focuses on the book collection of artist Kobe Matthys (1970–2023). For this ninth reading session, Jubilee invites Merzedes Sturm-Lie. Merzedes guides us through fragments from De Buik van Brussel (‘The belly of Brussels’) by Lucas Catherine (2019) and makes connections with Things from Agency’s List. At Agency’s Praticauthèque, Brussels
27/02/2026, 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 and 2026, 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 February 2026 we invite Merzedes Sturm-Lie, visual artist and curator, also active as a musician, guest teacher and in close contact with Jubilee as head of the ‘Jadran Sturm & Åsa Lie’ artist estate. She writes:

This book caught my attention in Kobe Matthys’ library at Agency, while I was working on a sound piece including Brusseleir, the Brussels dialect. I had just met Myriam, an elderly woman, at Vrienden van Het Huizeke, an organization that fights poverty and homelessness in the Marollen in Brussels. We talked about my text, which is about a wounded swan and the surprising number of expressions related to death unique to the Brusseleir dialect. Myriam recited it in Brusseleir while I recorded her, followed by me playing the trumpet, imagining its bell as the elegant neck of a swan. These recordings were included in a recent cassette release titled: Beste voyageurs. Den train stoêt stille omda er ’n geblesseide zwoên op et spour leit. De zwoên es ’n beschermde deersout. (Dear passengers. The train is standing still because there is an injured swan lying on the track. The swan is a protected species.)

In The Belly of Brussels, Lucas Catherine tells stories from the old harbor of Brussels: the Sint-Katelijne Market and the Vismet, with its taverns, dockworkers, fishmongers, and prostitutes. He traces the histories surrounding the different fish that were sold — shrimp, mussels, eel, and herring — as well as imported colonial products such as coffee, cocoa, and bananas. Major dramas also unfold in the neighborhood and become the subject of folk songs sung in the Brussels dialect: the horrific murder of Jeanneke van Calck; the beautiful love story of the Peerlemoergang; or the sad end of two brewery hands who drank themselves to death in the Bummelstraat after a bet spiraled out of control. Lucas Catherine is a historian of forgotten matters and an advocate of oral history.

 

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)