Reading Room #49: Agency & Learning to See

Jubilee’s 2025-26 cycle of Reading Rooms focuses on the book collection of artist Kobe Matthys (1970–2023). For this eleventh session Jubilee invited visual artist Jonathan De Maeyer. He selected fragments from Apprendre à voir: Le point de vue du vivant / Leren kijken: De optiek van het levende (2021) by French art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual. Reading in Dutch & French, discussion in English. At Agency’s Praticauthèque, Brussels
29/04/2026, 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.

For this eleventh reading session Jubilee invited visual artist Jonathan De Maeyer. He selected fragments from Apprendre à voir: Le point de vue du vivant / Leren kijken: De optiek van het levende (2021) by French art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual.

“Plants, animals and other organisms form a living world with which we are intertwined, yet in our culture they are often little more than a backdrop to our existence. Estelle Zhong Mengual takes nineteenth-century landscape painting and natural history as her starting point for exploring how we might perceive the living world differently. Through this enrichment of perception, we too learn to look more closely.”

Jonathan writes:

I chose this book because it helps me understand how I, and people in general, perceive our (natural) surroundings. I have come to realise that it is not always the image itself that fascinates me, but rather the idea of the image, which is constructed. As a result, I am more intrigued by the viewer than by the object of observation. Throughout the pages of this book, I will discuss my relationship with photography by exploring my focus on observation and perception. In my work, fictional and documentary approaches challenge human perspectives. By utilising a range of media, often starting with the image, I try to explore and articulate the complexity and reality of the living world.

 

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)

29/04/2026: Reading Room #49: Agency & Learning to See (Jonathan De Maeyer)