Reading Room #48: Agency & Translation

Jubilee’s 2025-26 cycle of Reading Rooms focuses on the book collection of artist Kobe Matthys (1970–2023). This tenth reading session is the first where the guest is invited by Agency: Amit Leblang. She selected fragments from Scandals of translation: towards an ethics of difference by Lawrence Venuti (1998). At Agency’s Praticauthèque, Brussels
26/03/2026, 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 non-profit Agency alive, including the archive and his library, 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 is a source of relevant conversations, discoveries, and encounters with participants Jubilee did not yet know. The collaboration between Jubilee and Agency evolves into a co-curation of the Reading Rooms at the Praticauthèque, taking care of their programme alternately. Reading Room #48 is the first to be proposed by Agency: Amit Leblang is one of six artist-researchers working at and with Agency’s Praticotheque in 2026-2027. She cites the book’s publisher:

“Translation is stigmatized as a form of writing, discouraged by copyright law, deprecated by the academy, exploited by publishers and corporations, governments and religious organizations. Lawrence Venuti exposes what he refers to as the ‘scandals of translation’ by looking at the relationship between translation and those bodies – corporations, governments, religious organizations, publishers – who need the work of the translator yet marginalize it when it threatens their cultural values.” (Routledge, 2022)

I chose to read Venuti’s Scandals because of its ethics-of-difference framework, which, at the time of its publication (1998) and now, remains a challenge to our world. Through translation, Venuti shows how the fiction of the singular author erases the labour of those who carry a work across languages and cultures. His critique of “domestication”, the demand to smooth over the cultural foreignness so that a translation reads as if it were never translated at all, is something I keep confronting in my own life and work. Venuti’s critique of translation’s invisibility connects to questions of cross-cultural knowledge production, language, and power, where the politics of translation are both literal and territorial.

Amit Leblang (1994) is a Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist, researcher, language teacher, and language student. Her work investigates translation as both methodology and material, paying attention to the movement translation creates and its ability to expose emotional and cultural undertones. Guided by philosophical and political questions, she deals with the tensions between intimacy and distance, documentation and staging, tenderness and control.

 

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)

26/03/2026: Reading Room #48: Agency & Translation (Amit Leblang)