Jubilee–platform for artistic research

Reading Room #51: Agency & Cannibal Metaphysics

Jubilee’s 2025-26 cycle of Reading Rooms focuses on the book collection of artist Kobe Matthys (1970–2023). For this thirteenth session Jubilee and Agency invite Eszter Németi, member of the BARN Core Team and initiator of the School of Magical Politics. Eszter guides us through a reading of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics (2017). At Agency’s Praticotheque, Brussels
18/06/2026, 18-21:00h

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.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics is a difficult book. I mean that here as a recommendation. It requires slowing down, rereading, and ideally other people. I first came across it through the School of Magical Politics, an artistic research platform I have been developing for some years, where we read excerpts alongside Ailton Krenak and in the wake of thinking about magical realism and the pushback against it within American literatures and thought.

Viveiros de Castro insists that what he calls Amerindian thought constitutes not a mythology to be interpreted but a philosophy to be taken seriously on its own terms. The book is brilliant, and it is also a reckoning with the ethics of anthropology, with what it means for different epistemologies to come into genuine relation.

I chose it for this reading room because it keeps returning me to a question that has been central to my practice for over a decade: how do I hold (onto) other people’s ideas? Not absorb or translate them into something more familiar, but actually hold them with their distance, with the right friction. That is also, I think, what a reading groups can do that a solo reader cannot. This is the invitation.