Reading Room #53: Notes for an Art School

Jubilee’s 2025-26 cycle of Reading Rooms focuses on the book collection of artist Kobe Matthys (1970–2023). The ‘art school’ in the title of this Reading Room shall be a prefigurative rather than a literal one: for this fifteenth session Jubilee coordinator Jesse van Winden proposes to read parts of two books, as an occasion to reflect on Jubilee as a learning environment. Notes for an Art School (2006) was part of the research for Manifesta 6. Commons Museums, Pedagogies for Taking Ownership of What is Lost (2024) is Nuraini Juliastuti’s essay about two initiatives in rural Indonesia to rethink infrastructures for collective practice, learning and survival.
29/10/2026, 18-21:00h

Notes for an Art School lays the theoretical ground for Manifesta 6, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art that was supposed to take place in Nicosia (Cyprus) in 2006 but was cancelled at the last moment. The curators Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel proposed to challenge the conventional format of the large-scale exhibition and, alternatively, set up an art school – the Manifesta 6 School.

The contributors to the book rethink the goals and structure of an art school, its ideological contexts, the positioning of its students to the art world, its relationship to social and political conditions, and the level of its discursive involvement, drawing on specific examples and on their own experiences to interrogate the appropriateness and validity of existing school models.

In 2022, Jubilee visited documenta fifteen, the exemplary manifestation of collective practice in the world now, co-curated by ruangrupa and many other collectives from around the world. Inspired, Jubilee organised Learning from Lumbung in January 2023, to bring together new ways of thinking about the arts, based on inclusive forms of ownership and a redistribution of value, that can form the fertile ground for the art landscape of tomorrow.

Nuraini Juliastuti, the author of Commons Museums, Pedagogies for Taking Ownership of What is Lost (2024), is a co-founder of KUNCI Study Forum & Collective in Yogyakarta (founded 1999), which is a lumbung inter-lokal member of documenta fifteen and part of the same Indonesian collective ecosystem as ruangrupa and Gudskul.

In her book, Juliastuti discusses two rural community bases in extraction-affected areas in Indonesia where both crisis and protest are more intense than what we are used to in Northwestern Europe. In an attempt at unlearning hegemonies and their modes that we have interiorized, it seems only logical to turn to farther societies for inspiration. Reading about these contexts where people reappropriate the concept of ‘school’ to redefine their positions in society can give a new dimension to our notions of learning, sharing and resilience.

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 since Kobe’s passing, including the Practicotheque with the List of Things and his library. 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.

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)

29/05/2026: Reading Room #50: Agency on Agency (Julie Van Elslande & Louise de Bethune)

18/06/2026: Reading Room #51: Agency & Cannibal Metaphysics (Eszter Németi)

17/09/2026: Reading Room #52: Les bruits de la nature (Vincent Meessen)