Reading Room #42: Archipelago of Artistic Practices

Jubilee’s 2025 cycle of Reading Rooms focuses on the library of artist Kobe Matthys (1970-2023). For this fourth reading session Jubilee invites Raphaël Pirenne, curator, teacher and board member of Agency. Raphaël Pirenne proposes ‘The Instition of Critique’ (2006), an essay by Hito Steyerl that reframes notions of ‘institutional critique’.  Exceptionally, this Reading Room does not take place at Agency’s Praticauthèque, but at Out of Sight.
16/06/2025, 18-21h

Agency / Agence / Agentschap was the practice of Kobe Matthys, an internationally renowned artist, but also an activist, involved in permaculture, working member of SOTA and a beloved teacher and mentor of art students at the École de recherche graphique (ERG, Brussels).

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, Jubilee organised a Reading Room programme that drew on Fred Dewey’s library. In 2025, Jubilee opens up Matthys’ thematically vast library (with an estimated 4000 books, magazines and other titles) for its Reading Rooms.

A small group of enthusiasts have been keeping Matthys’ archive and library alive since his passing. With this archive, Matthys 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 social, economic and environmental ramifications we are increasingly experiencing. The monthly selection provides a source of conversations, discoveries and encounters with participants Jubilee do not yet know.

Out of Sight is a venue for contemporary art, aiming to find the potential hidden within what is often perceived as different, marginal or even unwanted. It makes room for the ephemeral and the ambiguous. Out of Sight is a space where the poetic and the political meet. The programme is built around international cooperations among artists, curators, researchers and the public at large. It strives for a critical and flexible approach, with the objective to support a development and experimentation in arts that is outside the logic of consumption and markets.

In June we invite Raphaël Pirenne, curator, teacher and board member of Agency. He proposes ‘The Instition of Critique’ (2006), an essay by Hito Steyerl.

Part of Archipelago of Artistic Practices, a Research Summit organised by Jubilee and M HKA. The programme and exhibition are built around Eavatea, a digital infrastructure for mapping research-based and transdisciplinary practices. Archipelago of Artistic Practices take place in conjunction with M HKA’s major exhibition The Geopolitics of Infrastructure and includes the participation of many of its exhibiting artists.

 

Calendar of Agency Reading Rooms 2025

20/01/2025: Reading Room #38: Agency

17/03/2025: Reading Room #39: Agency and the Undercommons

14/04/2025: Reading Room #40: Agence & Notre condition

19/05/2025: Reading Room #41: Agency & NICC

16/06/2025: Reading Room #42: Archipelago of Artistic Practices

 

 

Practical

Out of Sight: Somersstraat 31, 2018 Antwerp

Entrance: free