Archipelago of Artistic Practices
A Jubilee and M HKA Research Summit
In collaboration with CKV and nadine
Part of Archipelago of Artistic Practices, an artistic and discursive programme that runs from July 2024 to July 2025.
M HKA INBOX and 6th floor, and extra muros at Out of Sight, Antwerp
Performances, presentations and conversations: 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21 June 2025
Exhibition: 13 June – 13 July 2025
Artists:
Tekla Aslanishvili, Justin Bennett, Köken Ergun, Ciel Grommen, Assem Hendawi, Åsa Lie, Zheng Mahler, Vincent Meessen, Hélène Meyer, Scott William Raby, Shahana Rajani, Pejvak, Maximiliaan Royakkers, Mirwan Andan and Iswanto Hartono (ruangrupa), Jadran Sturm, Merzedes Sturm-Lie, Filip Van Dingenen, Stijn Van Dorpe, Clémentine Vaultier, Vermeir & Heiremans
Art workers and researchers:
Ariadna Estella Alba, Samira Alirezabeigi, Nick Axel, Evi Bert, Louise de Bethune, Sabeth Buchmann, Federico Ferretti, Johannes Grillet, Guy Gypens, Nav Haq, Loes Jacobs, Eleonoor Kenis, Sarah Késenne, Pierre Marchand, Raphaël Pirenne, Katrien Reist, Emily Rosamond, Julie Vanderhaeghen, Julie Van Elslande, Tobias Van Royen, Jesse van Winden, Danielle van Zuijlen
Organisations and collectives:
Agency, Atelier Cartographique, BARN Core Team of the Brussels Artist-Run Network, Bureau of Analogies, f.eks., Jadran Sturm & Åsa Lie Private Foundation, Kanal, Kenniscentrum Coöperatief Ondernemen, Kunsthal Gent, nadine, NICC, Re-Connect Festival, Seasonal Neighbours, State of the Arts (SOTA).
Towards a sustainable alternative artistic infrastructure. An ambitious and multifaceted Research Summit built around an innovative digital infrastructure for mapping research-based practices. The Research Summit consists of an exhibition and a discursive and performative programme, woven into one another.
Archipelago of Artistic Practices is a Research Summit organised by Jubilee and M HKA based on Eavatea, a digital infrastructure for mapping research-based and transdisciplinary practices. The programme and exhibition take place in conjunction with M HKA’s major exhibition The Geopolitics of Infrastructure and includes the participation of many of its exhibiting artists. The Research Summit kicks off with performances and participatory events on the opening evening of the exhibition, and then centres around four thematic days and two evening programmes, addressing:
Performing Eavatea (opening evening 12 June, 18-21h)
The Geopolitics of Infrastructure (14 June, 11-18h)
Infrastructure of Archives (15 June, 14-18h)
Reading Room: Archipelago of Artistic Practices (16 June, 18-21h)
Live Conversation: Archipelago of Artistic Practices (19 June, 19:30-21h)
Cooperative Infrastructures (20 June, 11-18h)
Mapping and Performing Infrastructure (21 June, 11-18h)
The programme of performances, presentations and conversations brings together artists and researchers for an ambitious programme of talks and activities in support of rethinking artistic infrastructure sustainably. It seeks to offer participants a convivial space for opening insights and opportunities into the possibilities of collaborative research, commoning of resources, and cooperative distribution for artistic practice.
The exhibition takes place across M HKA’s Inbox space and 6th floor. It presents a number of artistic research narratives – objects, documents, protocols, etc – and imagines how these various art practices can be linked based on their singular research trajectories. As such it is conceived as a spatial transposition of the tool, with a strong emphasis on the relational and narrative potential that Eavatea currently embodies.
In the context of this Research Summit, Vincent Meessen has written From institutional critique to infrastructural critique? This short critical text articulates the rise of artistic awareness of infrastructure in terms of a de-proletarianisation of artistic work.
The Research Summit focuses on the premise of ‘learning by doing’. Collective interventions and moments of constructive reflection, including conversations, screenings, performances and walks, explore themes of the exhibition and interrogate the Eavatea interface as an innovative relational infrastructure that seeks to inspire, initiate and underpin new research-based artistic trajectories.
Download the leaflet with the full programme here (PDF: 1,5 MB). It is designed by Olivier Bertrand.
Eavatea
Currently under development through a Brussels-based partnership with nadine and Atelier Cartographique, Jubilee named Eavatea after a notation on a map drawn by Tupaia, a Polynesian 18th century master navigator. Tupaia merged the Western Mercator mapping paradigm with traditional wayfinding forms guided by nature and storytelling. His converging of these two systems of representation proved to be inspiring for the development of Eavatea, eliciting such questions as: how would the interface explore new narrative possibilities and visualise, display, archive and distribute artistic practices that are in situ, nomadic, collective or transdisciplinary? How would Eavatea embody the situated knowledge generated by these practices and, most importantly, highlight possible links between them?
As a research infrastructure for innovation and commoning, and built with open-source software, Eavatea brings production, distribution and financing into novel alignment. Opening up to new forms of solidarity through a hybrid of digital and physical relations, Eavatea raises pertinent questions around art’s predominant infrastructure with its focus on the artist as individual practitioner.
Eavatea has been in development since 2022 through a partnership between Atelier Cartographique, nadine and members of Jubilee.
Jubilee is a Brussels-based platform for artistic research jointly developed and led by its members, visual artists and art workers. Jubilee’s focus on supporting artistic practices and initiating collective research embodies the platform’s ambition for an ecology of artistic practices. Since 2013, Jubilee has developed various research tools. Next to Eavatea these include the Caveat website on relational contracting, Tracks, a smartphone app for audio-walks, and monthly Reading Rooms. Jubilee’s annual Summer Schools aim to develop ideas around artistic self-organisation and alternative pedagogies, linking cooperative models and commoning with broader societal issues.
Atelier Cartographique SC is a Brussels-based worker cooperative of cartographic practices. It focuses on the cultural challenges of cartography and the social dimensions of spatial representations and information systems technologies. Atelier Cartographique provides tools for administrations, NGOs, cultural actors, academic research, and citizen driven initiatives.
nadine is a Brussels-based laboratory for contemporary transdisciplinary arts. Through (on-site) residencies, research projects and workshops, the organisation gives artists the space and time to develop their practice. nadine is closely connected to wandering arts—practices that are fluid, temporary, and traverse different locations and media. Within this context, “mapping” plays a central role: the act of tracing, framing, and making these practices public – both online and offline. The notion of a shared tool – one that is transparent and adaptable to the context-specific nature of these practices – supports this broader aim: to facilitate collaboration, foster accessibility, and offer continuity across shifting artistic trajectories.
Practical information
The Research Summit takes place in a public programme at M HKA on Thursday 12, Saturday 14, Sunday 15, Friday 20 and Saturday 21 June 2025, and at Out of Sight on Monday 16 and Thursday 19 June.
The exhibition runs in M HKA’s INBOX space and on the 6th floor from Friday 13 June until Sunday 13 July
Attendance is free. Registration is required through this link. You can register for all or some days.
Language: English
Archipelago of Artistic Practices is developed in conjunction with the exhibition:
The Geopolitics Of Infrastructure
Contemporary Perspectives
M HKA, 13 June – 21 September 2025
Including: Tekla Aslanishvili, Mirwan Andan & Iswanto Hartono, Winnie Claessens, Köken Ergun & Fetra Danu, Köken Ergun & Tashi Lama, Assem Hendawi, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Pejvak, Shahana Rajani, Sojung Jun, The Question of Funding, Jonas Staal and Zheng Mahler.
Curated by Nav Haq
Infrastructure is big ideas. It finds its purpose in facilitating the flows, exchanges and support structures that shape our lives, livelihoods and civilisations. Across its multiple purposes, including such things as trade, transport, manufacturing, energy, communication and war, as well as key facets of the public sphere including health, education, utilities and the arts, it embodies the idea of a world in motion.
Whether public, private or some hybrid of both, infrastructure projects have become potent symbols of modernisation, ambition, influence and power in many parts of the world. It is the current and future relation between things. The classical elements – earth, wind, water, fire – are exploited in a context of overlapping jurisdiction, transnational circulation, rapid urbanisation, and the structuring of labour. All of this exposing the landscape to complex geopolitics.
Artists, through their practice, are considering the political commitments, imagination, affect, and power relations of infrastructure. The exhibition The Geopolitics of Infrastructure will present the work of a generation of artists bringing contemporary perspectives on the particular topicality of infrastructure in the trans-national, geopolitical context.
Further information about The Geopolitics of Infrastructure can be found here.
Credits
Eavatea has been in development since 2022 through a partnership between Atelier Cartographique, nadine and members of Jubilee.
Jubilee is a Brussels-based platform for artistic research jointly developed and led by its members, visual artists and art workers. Jubilee’s focus on supporting artistic practices and initiating collective research embodies the platform’s ambition for an ecology of artistic practices. Since 2013, Jubilee has developed various research tools. Next to Eavatea these include the Caveat website on relational contracting, Tracks, a smartphone app for audio-walks, and monthly Reading Rooms. Jubilee’s annual Summer Schools aim to develop ideas around artistic self-organisation and alternative pedagogies, linking cooperative models and commoning with broader societal issues.
In 2025, Jubilee is supported through M HKA’s participation in the L’Internationale programme Museum of the Commons. Archipelago of Artistic Practices is a Research Summit produced by Jubilee and M HKA, in co-production with Atelier Cartographique (Brussels), Flemish Centre for Art Archives (CKV, Antwerp), f.eks. (Aalborg), Kunsthal Gent (Ghent) and nadine (Brussels). The programme is supported by the Flemish Community (VG) and the Flemish Community Commission Brussels (VGC).
The Research Summit Archipelago of Artistic Practices and the exhibition The Geopolitics of Infrastructure take place within the framework of the current L’Internationale project Museum of the Commons.
L’Internationale is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
Archipelago of Artistic Practices
The Eavatea team, together with nadine, Kunsthal Gent, Festival Publieke Werken (Ghent), M HKA and Flemish Center for Art Archives (CKV), are working on Archipelago of Artistic Practices, an artistic and discursive programme that runs from July 2024 to July 2025. The programme questions the Eavatea prototype as an innovative relational infrastructure. The programme of artistic presentations is a prism to have conversations about it that are precise, ambitious and public.
Eavatea is currently a prototype in development, which means that there is room for improvement, both in terms of the architecture and design of the tool. But even more important are the discussions and efforts that still need to take place in terms of its use, management and distribution. The public programmes proposed here, consisting of discussions, workshops, film screenings, presentations of inspiring historical and contemporary examples and artists experimenting with the mapping prototype, will delve deeper into the new possibilities of the prototype: both in terms of (collective) research, presentation, archiving and distribution, as well as questions around management, collective ownership, and commoning in order to allow other communities use their own version of the tool with their own interpretation.
Consultation at the level of use, management and distribution of the tool are the three basic anchors of the Archipelago of Artistic Practice programmes. They address the possibilities and implications of the prototype, but are also relevant to broader trends in the arts field and society: mapping versus countermapping, archiving and reactivating ephemeral practices, commoning and cooperatives, single and multiple authorship, memory and collection…
This brings us to three programme anchors.
1. Eavatea as artistic experiment: forms of counter-mapping
The dominant systems of indexing, archiving and geolocation on 2D maps are based on a Cartesian grid. Surveillance and data tracking of online maps do not allow for alternative narratives and different knowledge systems. How can knowledge systems be confronted and intermingled? The Eavatea prototype functions as a counter-mapping infrastructure and as such takes into account what we consider important in our art practices: an in-situ knowledge based on direct observation, discussions, collaborations. Our practices arise in encounters with people, in the urban or rural landscape, in narrative telling, in a time-lapse with relations and dependencies.
2. Eavatea as a collective instrument
From the need for a pluralistic perspective, the digital infrastructure raises questions about its management and legal framework. The legal questioning will focus on solutions that fit the values of commoning practices. Forms of co-ownership, co-authorship, licenses such as the ‘copyfair’ licenses where both the individual and the collective can share in the added value will be discussed. The organizational framework that we will create for this will be located in the play field between digital commons and cooperative enterprise.
3. Eavatea as a multiple community
Eavatea can bridge disciplines such as art, architecture and social practice and enrich them with practices from heritage, technology, cartography, etc. Eavatea can become an agora that encourages collective research with and for a public, and wants to enable a diversity of voices. Organisations and collectives can unite in different mapping communities. Together they form a federation in which they share values and commitments.
The Archipelago of Artistic Practices programme formats include artistic presentations (small exhibitions and showcases) in context of which there are open workshops with guests and peers invited from their specific expertise. These discursive programs are rounded off with public activities such as screenings, performances, walks, bike tours…
Programme chapters
Commons to Coop: Jubilee Summer School 2024
Archipelago of Artistic Practices: a Jubilee and M HKA Research Summit 2025
Commons to Coop
Jubilee Summer School 2024
During a week with workshops, walks and public conversations at Kunsthal Gent, we study local histories of cooperative organisation, and work with the new tool for artistic research and countermapping Eavatea. Part of Archipelago of Artistic Practices, an artistic and discursive programme around the questions that Eavatea provokes
01/07 – 05/07/2024
Kunsthal Gent and various locations around Ghent
Currently a working prototype, Eavatea is a digital tool for developing, visualising, archiving and relating practices is specifically designed for sharing practices that do not present themselves easily in conventional exhibition contexts: research-based, often in situ, nomadic, collective, ephemeral, interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary practices.
Eavatea has many different authors. Considering the tool a knowledge commons, social researcher Mayo Fuster Morell claims its goal is “to expand resources in quality and over time, with a view to broadening the flow of knowledge to stimulate innovation, where exclusive intellectual property rights have blocked that process.” As a digital commons Eavatea requires regular maintenance and updates.
Jubilee’s Summer School 2024 explores the dynamic between a commons and an economic model that operates on the basis of collective ownership: the cooperative. In response to the social urgencies that were caused by the industrialization of Belgium a number of successful cooperatives were initiated in Ghent. In a series of workshops and walks we will explore inspiring models from the past, but also from the present.
Commons to Coop is part of Archipelago of Artistic Practices (2024 – 2025), an artistic and discursive program around Eavatea, by Jubilee in collaboration with Atelier Cartographique, CKV, f.eks., Kunsthal Gent, M HKA, and nadine.
Programme
Monday 1 to Wednesday 3 July, 10–14h (not public)
Eavatea countermapping workshops
Monday 1 July, 15–18h
Public excursion
A visit to Gentse Gronden (Ghent’s Lands), an exhibition at STAM that offers a historical picture of public land ownership in and around Ghent. Today, the land owned by the city of Ghent is subject to debate. Should these lands be sold to finance a social policy, or should they remain public property? What role can land play in issues surrounding climate, food security and urban policy?
After our visit to Gentse Gronden we will meet Raf Verbeke. Last year, he and his action group Te Duur forced a referendum on affordable housing in Ghent, but Verbeke was also involved in the lawsuit surrounding the sale by the Ghent OCMW of 467 hectares of agricultural land in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen to the Dutch company Bijloke BV, a subsidiary of a Luxembourg company of Fernand Huts (Katoen Natie). After years of legal battle, the Ghent Court of Appeal annulled the sale in November 2022. “Those lands are again in public hands,” says Verbeke. “We call on the OCMW to register these lands as active again and to integrate them into the city’s agricultural policy.”
Departure from Kunsthal Gent at 14:30h, or meeting at STAM at 15h
Monday 1 July, 20h
Fermentation and Speculation
Scott William Raby & Tobias Van Royen introduce their research project Bureau of Analogies (BOA), which focuses on fermentation and speculation, and draws parallels between Fermented Wild Ales communities in Belgium and the broader art sector. Due to their long shelf life these beers can be speculated on and along with their uniqueness, and difficulty to produce, make their socio-economic qualities quite similar to the output of the artists and art workers.
Location: Kunsthal bar
Tuesday 2 July, 18–21h
Reading Room #33, Fred Dewey and the Brechtian theatre
This Reading Room is the sixth instalment around the library of the American thinker and organiser Fred Dewey. Jubilee member and legal scholar Louise de Bethune has selected a book from the Dewey library. While reading excerpts she will guide us through the complex notion of multiple authorship.
Fred Dewey had a fierce commitment to creating public spaces for intellectual and political engagement. His home base was Los Angeles, but the last years of his life he spent in Brussels. In 2022 Dewey died unexpectedly. To ensure the continuation of his legacy, the Fred Dewey Legacy Project was initated, aiming to set up initiatives that extend Dewey’s work, as well as preserve his considerable library. Summer 2023 artists Filip van Dingenen and Hélène Meyer re-installed part of Dewey’s extensive library. They are opening up his collection of books to artists and researchers from their studio home. One way to activate this library is Jubilee’s 2024 Reading Room program.
Location: Kunsthal Cura’s Garden
Wednesday 3 July, 15–18h
Public excursion
A walk in collaboration with Katinka de Jonge, which will take us from Kunsthal Gent along various places where the 19th century cooperative Vooruit was active. We will pass by the first coop supermarket modelled on the fashionable Grand Bazars of Paris, as well as the Vooruit printing house and the first workers bank. We will end our excursion in the art center Viernulvier which in a previous life was known as the festive hall of the cooperative Vooruit. In Vooruit we will listen to an excerpt from Kunst Veredelt (Art Enobles), an audio walk by Katinka de Jonge, Adriënne van der Werf, Leonore Spee and Sascha Bornkamp.
Departure from Kunsthal Gent at 15h
Wednesday 3 July, 20h
Film screenings
Screening of two short films on the cooperative movement
Onze drang naar bevrijding (1960 – Emile Vandervelde Instituut) 25′
Our Urge for Liberation was made on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Belgian Socialist Party. It outlines the misery of the working class in the ‘belle époque’ and the struggle it waged to improve its fate. Images of alleys and slum houses, child labor, the demonstrations for universal suffrage, the strikes of 1932 and 1936, the repression by the police. The film includes fragments from, among others, Henri Storck’s Misère au borinage and Newspaper Vooruit. The second half of the film provides an overview of a number of achievements attributed to the socialist movement.
Can We Do It Ourselves (2015 – Ekonomisk Demokrati) 59′
The film focuses on economic philosophy with an emphasis on the concept of economic democracy. It calls into question the fact that democracy prevails in so many models of world politics, yet not in economic spheres. By examining the key differences between market, capitalist and democratic economies, the filmmakers are able to present the many perceived benefits of empowering the working class, re-calibrating the scales of corporate influence and prioritizing the well-being of those providing labor over the maximization of profit.
Location: Kunsthal cinema
Thursday 4 July 2023, 14–18h
Public excursion
A visit to Le jardin des Fraternités ouvrières, a permaculture garden initiated by Josine and Gilbert Cardon. In the course of 50 years they gathered around them a group of gardeners, who became the association Les Fraternités Ouvrières. As volunteers they share their knowledge and the 6,000 varieties of seeds in their grain library with more than 3,000 members. In 2000 Gilbert passed away, and Josine recently went to a retirement home for the elderly. Currently the garden is maintained by the group of volunteers.
Departure from Kunsthal Gent: 14h. For who does not come from Ghent: meet at Le Jardin directly
Thursday 4 July 2023, 19–21h
Live Conversation 1 – nadine on location in Kunsthal
Julie Vanderhaeghen (Atelier Cartographique), Loes Jacobs (nadine), Maximiliaan Royakkers and Ciel Grommen (Atlas of Ovens) introduce Eavatea, and discuss how the partners have developed the mapping prototype both as a curatorial and an artistic practice. This involves archiving, publishing and finally activating, the three basic functions of Eavatea that aim to enable a relational dynamic between the uploaded practices. Eavatea as an agora will be tested, and the new possibilities for conducting collective research will be experimented with in collaboration with the public. Artist duo Vermeir & Heiremans will moderate the conversation.
Location: Kunsthal cinema
Thursday 4 July 2023, 21h
International folk costume (2016), a performance by Åsa Lie, Kunsthal Gent
Dressed in an outfit made from heat foil, tape and a letter from a friend, Åsa Lie moves between the installations of Kunsthal’s Endless Exhibition. The fragility of the dress and the crisp sounds it produces, provoked by Lie’s movements and gestures, contrast with the actual sensation of warmth that the dress gives her. Presented for the first time at the exhibition Upstairs Basement I & II. Espace at MOSS, Brussels & MOSS Utställningar, Stockholm in May-June 2016, Åsa Lie’s appearance reminds us of the news images of people fleeing a crisis and receiving first aid after arriving on unknown shores. An image that simultaneously embodies human care and deep despair.
Location: Kunsthal Gent
Friday 5 July 2024, 19–21h
Public Conversation: Commons to Coop
Mutualization of risk has always been an important motivation for establishing Jubilee as an artist-run initiative. In the context of the rollout of the mapping tool Eavatea, we ask ourselves whether membership of a cooperative can lay the foundation for a form of mutualisation that, with a modest individual cost, could still provide a significant collective benefit, namely the long-term continued survival of Eavatea, as a digital commons. In a public conversation with Aline Hernandez and Erik Bordeleau we will be exploring and constructing possible dynamics between a knowledge commons and the cooperative model.
Erik Bordeleau is a philosopher and co-founder of The Sphere DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), a cooperative network on the blockchain that explores forms of co-ownership and self-organization. Aline Hernandez is the artistic director of Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht. Her interests focus on the development of concrete tools that would put to practice some of the ideas the institute has developed in the past years. Artist duo Vermeir & Heiremans will moderate the conversation.
Location: Kunsthal Cinema
Practical
Location of the events and starting point of the walks:
Kunsthal Gent
Lange Steenstraat 14
9000 Ghent
For inquiries and registrations, contact Jubilee: info@jubilee-art.org.
Only in case of urgencies, call: +32 470 653 278
Credits
Autumn 2022 a partnership between a number of small artist-run initiatives, including five artist members of Jubilee, the Danish nomadic organisation f.eks. and the Brussels-based laboratory for contemporary transdisciplinary art nadine started working closely with Atelier Cartographique, a cooperative that designs digital maps, on a digital interface that could archive and publish the ephemeral practices of the initiatives and artists involved. The tool would allow the situated knowledge generated by their practices not only to become more visible for the public and colleagues, but it would also visualize possible links between these practices.
Archipelago of Artistic Practices is produced by Jubilee, in co-production with Atelier Cartographique (Brussels); Casco Art Institute (Utrecht); Flemish Centre for Art Archives (CKV, Antwerp), f.eks. (Aalborg); Kunsthal Gent; M HKA (Antwerp), nadine (Brussels).
The program is supported by the Flemish Community (VG) and Flemish Community Brussels (VGC)
Jubilee Summer School Brussels: Alternative Learning and Self-organisation
22 – 26/09/2023
Various locations in and around Brussels
This summer school brings together a group of artists and researchers associated with Jubilee. The platform has been imagining and inventing an artist-run platform for artistic research since 2012. For this summer school everyone involved presents work, research or processes connected to alternative learning, presents their collective or organisation and its ways of working from which we can learn, or proposes activities framed by ideas of alternative learning, local knowledge, and self-organisation. Jubilee is itself a tool for artistic researchers to develop, produce and present their work. As such, it has developed different tools for artistic research for which this summer school has particular attention.
For the detailed programme, please see further below. Two moments are fully public:
Monday 25/09, 19:30h
Project(ion) Room – De Praeterestraat 55, 1180 Ukkel
Le balai libéré
Coline Grando, 2023, 88 min.
In the 1970s, the cleaning staff at the Catholic University of Louvain fired their bosses with the help of unions and engaged members of the university staff. They set up their own cleaning cooperative, Le Balai libéré. They ran the operation until in the course of the 1980s, when a new law required public institutions to periodically publish tenders for all ‘commercial’ partners. This inevitably led for-profit companies to promise to have the same work done for less money – by fewer people, higher work pressure, and worse professional relationships. Fifty years later, the cleaning staff at UCLouvain do not remember Le Balai libéré, even if most of them are rehired every time a new company ‘wins’ the cleaning contract with the university, as they are the only ones who are sufficiently knowledgeable and skilled for the task. They meet the self-organised workers of the past and wonderr: is working without a boss still an option?
Tuesday 26/09, 19:30h
Project(ion) Room – De Praeterestraat 55, 1180 Ukkel
Asger Jorn
Per Kirkeby, Denmark, 1977, 62 min.
An artist’s film about Asger Jorn, artistic researcher avant-la-lettre and founding member of the collectives and movements COBRA and the Situationist International.
Painter Per Kirkeby directed the film, about which he wrote: “Fiction. When I made my film about Asger Jorn, that was my starting point. Jorn was dead, I had never met him, but he had been very present in my life as an artist. As repulsion and attraction, a fiction in my life. And there were no other sources than the remains, reportage was out of the question. So the fiction of the film was the reconstruction of a character, a life, determined by the leftovers and my questions. Therefore, it became first and foremost a film about the choices and whys of a life in a time that was perhaps different. About the possible sovereignty of choices and their possible inevitability and melancholy. This fiction, this course of action, had to be experienced as a story in itself, without legitimisation in the fame of the works.”
The projection will feature a live voiceover in English, and a live soundtrack by Justin Bennett.
Complete programme
Friday 22/09_11.30h – 18h
Location: Orangeries de Bierbais: Rue de Bierbais 2 (or the gate in front of rue de Tilleuls 119), 1435 Mont-Saint-Guibert
The Orangeries de Bierbais is a ‘third place‘ situated in a historical English garden and tropical winter garden from 1828. The art and research residency program has a focus on alternative pedagogy, artistic experimentation, permaculture gardening and solidarity. After a walk through the garden, Ivana Momčilović, dramaturge, will introduce PhD In One Night, an international platform for aesthetic experimentation and education of all, and the different participants she invited for the day.
To commemorate the inauguration of the Orangeries de Bierbais (29 September 1828), a public event will be organised this year in solidarity with the present occupation of the Gécamines building (GCM, Société générale des carrières et des mines). Today, Martin van der Belen (Fondation La Nacelle) and Ivana invited Philip Buyck for a short presentation on the Patrice Lumumba Library, currently squatting at La Gécamines with 50 Congolese families.
PhD In One Night invited Axel Pleeck, philosopher, educator and director of Academy for Visual Arts Molenbeek to present several of his own creations of sharing the knowledge, including a fragment of a Chambre d’écoute, a form of collective listening, linking music and philosophy, which responds to Jacques Rancière’s Le Maître ignorant (1987).
Amateur experimental artist, writer and gardener Kaya Erdinc, presents his approach to amateur ways of poetics of knowledge.
Ivan Put, photographer, will show his short film about Orangeries de Bierbais. Xavier Lowenthal, editor and artist will present comics series Tintei akei Kongo that he edits and publishes with La cinquième couche. Using détournement and dérives, Tintin in Congo is reframed though the tonal Bantu language spoken in Lingala, Congo.
Finally, PhD In One Night shares the approach of their collaborator, Kurdish philosopher and translator of Rancière into Kurdish, Mansur Teifuri (who unfortunately can’t be present) regarding ‘ignorant knowledge’, ‘lessons of poets’, and their common Guerilla University in collaboration with the self-organised Kurdish Rojava University.
We stroll to the closest river nearby – l’Orne – as Elisée Reclus recommends us to do in his Histoire d’un ruisseau.
Practical: we travel from Brussels North Station 10:12h, arriving at Mont-Saint-Guibert 11:11h. Walk to Orangeries de Bierbais, arriving 11:30h. Food: from the garden.
Saturday 23/09_10.30h – 13h
Fred Dewey Library
Fred Dewey had a fierce commitment to creating public spaces for intellectual and political engagement. His home base was Los Angeles. Writer, teacher, publisher, editor extraordinaire, and former director of Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Los Angeles, Dewey has been engaged with the creation of plural human, physical, and textual space for a long time. “People are more willing to talk … when they’re sharing something deeply meaningful with each other. That’s why poetry becomes the foundation of a new kind of dialogue.”
Dewey passed away recently. To ensure the continuation of his legacy, the Fred Dewey Legacy Project was initated, aiming to set up initiatives that extend Dewey’s work, as well as preserve his considerable library. For the time being that library is currently installed in the house of artist Filip van Dingenen. Filip intends to make the Dewey legacy public and will invite artists to work with the library. During our visit we will read fragments of Dewey’s book The School of Public Life.
The visit and reading will be followed by a Seaweed footbath hosted by the Platform for Algae Diplomacy, created by the Brussels-based artists Filip Van Dingenen and Hélène Meyer. In a playful way it studies seaweed rights and seaweed spirits…
Saturday 23/09_14h – 18h
workshop – making sourdough
presentation – mapping prototype
Collectively making bread starts on Saturday afternoon with making the dough. The whole process will be accompanied by artist Marion Aeby, who also works as a professional baker. We will be making sourdough bread and brioches, a process which takes plenty of time and patience, since the dough needs to rest before it is reworked a couple of times. When the dough is resting we will present a prototype of a mapping tool. We will discuss a process of map making that aims to make the interconnectedness of our practices visible. Opening up this project to all Jubilee members, all current partners of this project will introduce their specific interest in the tool, which is currently still in development.
Sunday 24/09_11h – 17h
Atlas of Ovens – Baking Bread
Meeting point: Bakery Compagnon, Rue Jean Paquotstraat 44, 1050 Ixelles/Elsene
Location of the public oven: Hof Ter Musschen, Avenue E. Mounier 2, 1200 Woluwe-Saint-Lambert
Atlas of Ovens is an artistic research on heat practices, through the study and use of the infrastructures that contain and accompany them. In this project Ciel Grommen, Maximiliaan Royakkers and Clémentine Vaultier investigate how thermal infrastructures can transform not only matter, but also our relationships with communities and territories. How and what do we fire, and with whom do we share the resulting heat? Atlas of Ovens investigates how furnaces function not only as containers for physical energy, but also as relational infrastructures.
With this in mind Ciel Grommen, Maximiliaan Royakkers and Clémentine Vaultier wanted to participate in a firing of one of the public bread ovens, the so-called fours banaux, in Brussels. The banal oven is an infrastructure dating from feudal times. Today there is a network of bread ovens in public space in and around Brussels. During the firing of the bread we made the day before, Ciel, Maximiliaan and Clémentine will share elements of their Atlas of Ovens research and discuss with the organisers and bakers of the public oven.
Practical: At 11h we will meet at the Bakery Compagnon, Rue Jean Paquot 44, 1050 Ixelles where we will have a coffee and croissant, before leaving for the public oven, situated at Hof Ter Musschen Avenue E. Mounier 2, 1200 Woluwe-Saint-Lambert.
Monday 25/09_10.30h – 13h
f.eks. / Scott William Raby – The critical, post-, anti-institution
Location: radical_house: Luikenaarstraat/rue des Liégeois 2, 1050 Brussels
John Knight’s Advanced Beef was one of the most fundamental, radical, and experimental yet lesser known higher educational courses that shaped the artistic educational landscape of Southern California for nearly half a century. Michael Asher was a student within the very first Advanced Beef course at UCI Irvine taught by Knight in the late 60’s. The critical thinking course invited those curious in artistic and broader discursive conversations eminating from art to produce the curriculum themselves. As a former student in some of the last Advanced Beef courses (2010-12), Scott William Raby will revisit the course with the primary aim of blending some American and Danish perspectives, relating Knight’s radical interactions to the institutional educational contexts of Jakob Jakobsen and Katrine Dirckinck Holmfeld.
Monday 25/09_14h – 17h
School of Equals & pKp (para institute for art and precarity): Sarah Késenne, Stijn van Dorpe and Zehra Eviz (Belangenbond SAAMO)
Location: radical_house: Luikenaarstraat/rue des Liégeois 2, 1050 Brussels
Monday 25/09_19.30h
film screening Le Balai Liberé
Location: Project(ion) Room: De Praeterestraat 55, 1180 Ukkel
In the 1970s, the cleaning ladies of the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve fired their boss and created their own cleaning cooperative, Le Balai Libéré. Fifty years later, the cleaning staff of UCLouvain meets the workers of yesterday. In her film Coline Grando zooms in on the question if working without a boss, is still an option?
Tuesday 26/09_10.30h – 17h
ownership, authorship and usership
Tuesday 26/09_19.30h
Film screening – Asger Jorn, a film by Per Kirkeby, 1977, 62 min, with live performance of the original soundtrack of Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, by Justin Bennett
Live spoken commentary by X; translated from Danish to English by Rikke Ehlers Nilsson
Location: Project(ion) Room – De Praeterestraat 55, 1180 Ukkel
This edition of the summer school closes with a screening event. In 1976 Danish artist Per Kirkeby is commissioned to prepare a portrait-film about Asger Jorn, which is produced in 1977. His film summarizes Asger Jorn’s life and artistic practice, and expresses Kirkeby’s relationship with Jorn. The film gathers around a few episodes in Jorn’s life and takes its point of departure in the desolate, windswept landscapes of West Jutland, where he was born. In jumps linked together by the film’s spoken commentary, which are Jorn’s own words, the film takes us to the Arab quarter in Paris and to his house in Albisola in Italy, where he made the large ceramic relief that was erected in 1959 at the State High School in Aarhus.
In collaboration with radical_house, Orangeries de Bierbais, and Project(ion) Room
The Atlas of Ovens research is made possible through the financial support of Flanders State of the Arts
Eavatea
Eavatea is a dynamic, ever-changing artistic form for developing, visualising, presenting, archiving and interconnecting research-based artistic practices. Often unfolding in situ, Eavatea aims to incorporate these nomadic, collective, ephemeral and trans-disciplinary practices. It offers an active form of ‘counter-mapping’, taking into account the experience of physical space, the passage of time, the encounters between people and the stories they share. Eavatea is defined as a relational infrastructure that highlights connections between practices, documents and organizations, in this way generating new unexpected links and possible interdependencies. Eavatea aims to function as an agora, encouraging new modes of collective research that could be developed through using the tool as a digital meeting place, but also as a catalyst for physical gatherings. As a collective mode of curating, the tool triggers the creation of a growing and always shape-shifting collection of knowledge archipelagos, which can be made visible for a live audience or that can be consulted or re-activated later on.
Towards a Relational Infrastructure (2022-2025)
Since 2022, a partnership came together to explore the collective development of a digital interface created with open-source software. The partnership, consisting of artist collectives, artist-run and curator-run organisations, and a cooperative of cartographic practices, is a gathering of multiple viewpoints on how such a platform would visualise, present, archive, distribute and interconnect their in situ, nomadic, ephemeral, collective and transdisciplinary artistic practices.
The interface aims to function as a relational infrastructure, an agora encouraging new modes of initiating and sharing collective research practices that can be developed through using Eavatea as a digital meeting place. It is also a catalyst for physical gatherings focused on co-curating and public presentations. Eavatea will function as an interface where images, texts, sounds, maps are grouped as ‘archipelagos of practices’ that highlight their specific relations. In this way, Eavatea constitutes a source of collective knowledge production.
Testing the tool is an important step in an organic process of trial and error, of learning by doing.
With an Eavatea prototype underway the participatory reflections on the development of the platform will focus on how to govern and finance it on the long term, and finally how to distribute and share it with other practitioners who would benefit from its use. Our goal is to create different interconnected communities (inter)nationally that shape the interface to their own needs and share mutual ideas and commitments. Starting from a cooperative philosophy of common ownership/authorship, the governance of the Eavatea platform should acknowledge the need of the individual to sustain her/himself and yet create a solidarity economy by the mutual distribution of collectively generated values among all contributors.
Eavatea will be experimented with in the course of Archipelago of Artistic Pracices, an artistic and discursive program from July 2024 to July 2025, at nadine, Kunsthal Gent, M HKA and CKV.
What’s in a name
The aesthetics and shape of the tool are the result of a series of collective workshops with Atelier Cartographique. Its fragmented form was inspired by the Situationists’ mapping of Paris, and Piranesi’s etchings of the archaeological shards of a huge marble map of Rome. On a more conceptual level the maps of the 18th-century Polynesian navigator Tupaia introduced a form of counter-mapping with a strong narrative potential. Tupaia also gave us a lead for a name.
‘Eavatea’ means ‘high noon’. The word was noted on a map drawn by Tupaia, a Polynesian master navigator who had joined Captain Cook’s expedition in Tahiti in 1769. Cook’s crew offered Tupaia a Mercator map to draw the Polynesian archipelagoes, but rather than drawing according to western convention, he drew a ‘counter-map’, combining the western mapping system with a ‘translation’ of his wayfinding knowledge. This would include the oral tradition of ancestral songs and embodied knowledge of wind patterns, sea currents, movements of the sun and the stars, fish and birds and reflections on the underside of clouds. Eavatea marks the point where two representational systems merge in an act of collaborative knowledge production. Eavatea is also a Polynesian deity, the god of light, represented as half human and half fish. Its eyes were believed to be the sun and the moon.
Tupaia’s idea of merging knowledge systems led Jubilee to the idea of making Eavatea a meeting place for collective research where direct observation, activation of histories and stories of people could also find a place. The instrument was given a non-linear, rhizomatic structure. Eavatea does not want to be a website where things merely coexist. We define the mapping tool as a relational infrastructure. Eavatea is composed of shards on different scales, where each scale makes components of artistic practices divisible. On 3 levels it shows artistic “practices”, “gestures” connected to a practice and finally “traces” connected to a gesture. As a whole, the tool works as an instrument to zoom in and out on a practice and to discover its different components. At the same time, connections between different practices are exposed on each level. In addition to a constellation of shards, each scale also has a side panel – which defines shards, and allows the visitor to make connections with other projects. Eavatea allows a metaphorical interpretation of the ‘cartographic’, a kind of mind map. After all, some projects do not need geolocation.
A relational infrastruture
All shards in Eavatea will function as an interface on which images, texts, sounds, maps (with or without geo-reference) can be uploaded. These fragments appear as isolated islands, which we can edit and assemble into archipelagos. Each time a new shard is added, shards are regrouped as a new archipelago that highlights relationships between the uploaded documents. Islands may reposition themselves, depending on the relationships between practices, documents and organizations. In this way, new unexpected links and possible interdependencies between the fragments are formed. The void between the shards are spaces of freedom that make these connections and stories possible.
This makes the tool into a relational infrastructure. All documents that are uploaded embody the mutual relationships between all organizations, artists and collectives that participate in the development of Eavatea. The mapping tool should make visible this interconnectedness, the new areas of research that emerge. Through its up-loaded artistic practices Eavatea constitutes a source of collective knowledge production. We conceived the digital map as a dynamic, ever-changing artistic form that can generate encounters, discussions and unexpected stories. Our collective endeavor aims to incorporate a practice of counter-mapping that continually shifts between the geo-localized divine view of mapping and a critical disruption of map-making. Eavatea must be able to take into account what we find important in our practices: the experience of physical space, the passage of time, the encounters between people and the stories they share. As a digital space, it generates an extra layer that is added to our embedded practices rather than replace the situated knowledge derived from direct observation, emotions, collaborations, discussions…
Lost and Found, and Lost Again, While Addressing a Herd of Elephants in the Room
More on how Eavatea came about can be read Lost and Found, and Lost Again, While Addressing a Herd of Elephants in the Room, an essay co-authored by all partners. The text is published in Techniques Journal. This interdisciplinary magazine published by the University of Arizona, includes it in an edition dedicated to Dark Infrastructures.
Learning from lumbung
Public Forum on documenta fifteen
23 & 24/01/2023
The Indonesian collective ruangrupa were the curators of the most recent edition of . They gave a central place to collective artistic practices with special attention to participation, conversation, exchange and action, rather than internationally recognized individual artists who produce rather tradable objects. These practices, which come largely from the often underrepresented ‘Global South’, are characterized by a high degree of cooperation and trust – as a ‘lumbung’.
This Forum is organised to help us understand and collectively reflect on the resource distribution system that ruangrupa has set up, its limitations and emancipatory features. The presence of collective art practices in the highly visible context of , in addition to questions of collaborative work and self-organization, touches the heart of the economy of the contemporary art system. The existing global system of the art world is confronted with profound questions about the institutional consensus that currently guides the modern art world.
The questions posed in Kassel are important for the entire arts landscape, and not just for the visual arts, let alone for a specific organization. Learning from lumbung is equally inspired by an interest in 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. In the current political-economic context and in the context of the new arts decree of the Flemish Community, questions about the distribution of resources and (self-)organization are only becoming more relevant for more and more artists. The actors in the Brussels art landscape are stakeholders and carriers of this conversation.
Jubilee organises this public reflection together with The Kitchen, State of the Arts (SOTA), radical_house and école de recherche graphique (ERG), three organisations that emanate collectivity and reflect on the place of the arts within society. Jubilee initiated Learning from lumbung from an interest that it has previously articulated through Caveat and Emptor, collective research trajectories reflecting and acting on the ecology of artistic practice.
20h
Recording session of Kitchen Broadcast III
!RSVP, for reservations send an email to: thekitchenbxl@riseup.net
Iswanto Hartono is part of ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective that curated documenta fifteen. For documenta fifteen ruangrupa introduced lumbung as a practice, not only during but also leading up to and beyond the 100 days of the exhibition. After they were invited to be the Artistic Direction of documenta fifteen, the collective, in turn, invited documenta to be part of its ekosistem. The practice of lumbung enables an alternative economy of collectivity, shared resource building, and equitable distribution. It is anchored in the local and based on values such as humour, generosity, independence, transparency, sufficiency, and regeneration.
Subversive Film is a cinema research and production collective that aims to cast new light upon historic works related to Palestine and the region, to engender support for film preservation, and to investigate archival practices. Founded by Mohanad Yaqubi and Reem Shilleh in 2011, Subversive Film moves between Ramallah and Brussels, and was part of documenta fifteen.
This evening is hosted by the Kitchen. Kitchen Broadcast is an ongoing online conversation, listening to different voices, rhythms and sounds that reflect contemporary situations crossing their path in Brussels.
(*) lumbung is the Indonesian word for a communal rice-barn, where the surplus harvest is stored for the benefit of the community.
Programme 24 January, ERG (open access)
9:30h Doors open
10h
10:15h
12:15h
13h Lunch
14h
offee break
16:15h
17:15h
18h Snack break
18:30h
rinks
Practical information
Dates, times, locations, languages:
23/01, 20-22h
!RSVP, for reservations send an email to: thekitchenbxl@riseup.net
The Kitchen
c/o Globe Aroma
Moutstraat 26 rue de la Braie
1000 Brussels
Official language: English
24/01, 9:30-21h
Open access
École de Recherche Graphique (ERG)
Edelknaapstraat 87 rue du Page
1050 Brussels
Official languages: English & French
The Kitchen is a safehouse and a refuge for filmmakers, artists, and other cultural workers in and passing through Brussels, a meeting point for collaborative praxes.
radical_house is a long term project that stems from radical_hope’s practices: it presents a physical place, a framework and a logic. Initiated in 2020 by Heike Langsdorf, radical_house is currently co-curated together with Simone Basani and Alice Ciresola.
école de recherche graphique (ERG) is a place of artistic, plastic and graphic practices that enter theoretical and formal risk zones. A place and pedagogies to define and redefine collectively. It is a place where you can learn from what is not working. A place of research, therefore.
A Summer School on Laeso
First of Jubilee’s Summer Schools
Five-day Summer School in the former farmhouse studio of Asger Jorn on the small island of Læsø, Denmark, co-curated by Jubilee, f.eks. (DK) & Skal Contemporary (DK)
25 – 29/06/2022
The programme of this five-day Summer School on the Danish island of Læsø focused on collective research and learning through a series of semi-public events that aimed to strengthen and explore “our ecologies of artistic practices.” Taking inspiration from the convivial history of Asger Jorn’s rural studio and Læsø’s unique natural, cultural, and social resources, the project served as a launching point for fostering new artistic collaborations and long- term alliances.
Through collective workshops, walks, screenings, talks and concerts, the Summer School aimed to develop ideas around artistic self-organization and alternative pedagogies, and link cooperative models and commoning with broader issues related to changing ecological, social, and economic conditions in daily life and across society at large.
The Summer School was organised in partnership with Skal Contemporary, f.eks. and Jubilee. All of us sharing a mission as self-organized independent art initiatives, we develop research-based, transdisciplinary practices focusing on process and interaction.
Our five-day Summer School took place at the former farmhouse studio of Asger Jorn on the island of Læsø. Asger Jorn always tried to bring art and life closer together. The element of play was central to his work and thinking. His practice was very focused on collaborating with other artists. He initiated a number of collective art movements, for which his studios often became the physical setting – which was also the case for his farmhouse studio on Læsø. The general principles of the Situationist International, which he co-founded with a.o. Guy Debord, were an attack on capitalist exploitation and the degradation of daily life. They saw a revolutionary potential in alternative life experiences, situational constructions, unitary urbanism, psycho-geography, in unison with play, freedom, walking, and critical thinking. Jorn was also very interested in Norse mythology in which Læsø plays an important part. Especially the figure of the trickster Loki, a disruptive mythological character has inspired Jorn’s art practice. For 10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art, he assembled research and documentation for his Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism (SICV, 1961–65).
In the spirit of Asger Jorn’s international collaborations, the Summer School invited organizations and artists from Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru and Italy. This international group of artists and thinkers worked in close collaboration on Læsø with local agents, historians, organizers, artists and researchers.
Next to Asger Jorn’s experimental and radical approach to art and life, the Summer School delved into the pedagogical ideas of the Danish pastor, author, poet, philosopher, historian, teacher and politician, Nikolai Frederick Grundtvig (1783-1872), and the anarchist de-schooling ideas of the Brussels-based French geographer Élisée Reclus (1830-1905). In line with their ideas of situated knowledge, co-operation, mutualism, emancipation and citizenship, and according to their conviction that the best learning happens ‘through the soles of our feet’, the Summer School on Læsø consisted of on-site presentations, walks and workshops which focussed on the cultural and natural common resources of the island, and how these are governed. The island had and still has a small artistic community, and a particular way to harvest and use salt and seaweed, precious resources that condition until today daily life on the island. The invited artists and participants to the Summer School put into practice Reclus’ and Grundvig’s embodied pedagogical approach by using these resources in their workshops and walks to transform our way of thinking, discussing and collaborating.
Summer School Program
Saturday June 25th
# Visit to the artists in residence at Per Kirkeby’s former house and studio on Læsø.
In 1964 Jorn had bought an old farmstead on the island of Læsø from a fellow traveller on the train. The house would only be ready for use in 1968. Until then Albisola in Italy remained Jorn’s main working place, and he used the studio on Læsø during summer to meet with fellow artists, family and friends. After Jorn’s dead the farmhouse fell to ruins. Today Jorn’s house on Læsø is privately owned. There are plans to make Jorn’s house into an artist residency. Through the years a small art community developed on Læsø. Jorn’s dealer Børge Birch also bought a house on the island, and when Per Kirkeby came to live on the island he transformed a farm with seagrass roof into living spaces and built a new studio next to it, which is now used for artist residencies.
Sunday June 26th
# Introduction by Scott William Raby (f.eks.), Anne Møller Christensen & Sara Løvschall Grøntved (Skal Contemporary), Vermeir & Heiremans (Jubilee)
# Visiting Læsø Saltsyder (salt production site)
Læsø salt is extracted from groundwater since the Middle Ages. Activities had to be stopped in the 17th century after all the trees on the island had been cut for the necessary salt production fires. The historical practice was re-vived as a public limited company, the shares of which are not transferrable. It offers jobs and teaches skills to a local population.
# Presentation of Grundvig and his relation to Nordic Myths
At the salt production site, Grundvig’s view on the figure of the trickster Loki, represented in his work ‘Nordic Mythology’ (1832), was introduced by Leif Birker, a philosopher, historian and writer based on Læsø. Despite the fact that Grundtvig is critical of the selfish tendency in Loki’s concept of freedom he gives the provocative trickster a special place in his work. For Grundvig it is Loki, who with his teasing wit ensures that the battle between differing viewpoints is fought with word and spirit as weapons rather than fists. Grundtvig argues for a freedom that is not only tolerant of divergent thinking but is itself the condition for an exchange of views in a living interplay. According to Grundvig, social education always builds on a certain agreement on the common good. Where this understanding does not exist, the survival of the fittest takes over. For Grundtvig, school becomes a vital institution. It is the historical task of schools to loosen the knot between the individual and the state by other means than force.
See: Reading Room Loki and Grundtvig
# Discussion with Maria Francesca De Tullio
Maria Francesca is a legal scholar and activist based in Naples. On Læsø she introduced her involvement in running L’asilo, an art center in Naples that is operated as a commons. We discussed culture as commons and the development of legal tools that can protect urban commons. We introduced our respective organisations and their modes of operating, and to which extent we could re-organise ourselves as cooperatives or commons. Furthermore we discussed how we can build an international partnership, a more distributive way of governance, based on a mutual sharing of resources and ideas.
# Visit to Læsø Museum and a local farm on Læsø
Læsø Museum is a local cultural museum. The museum pays special attention to the singular style of building on Læsø with seaweed roofs as the most characteristic . This exceptional practice of roofing with eelgrass was started as an emergency solution, when the wood on the island was exhausted. Some of these roofs are more then 300 years old. On a local farm we spoke to Henning Johansen who is the expert restoring these types of roofs . The practice and transfer of knowledge has gained some attention. Today the eelgrass is an experimental material for the construction of acoustic and insulation construction panels. At the farm we were allowed to dig out local clay from the pond and gathering 300 year old eelgrass recuperated from old roofs as resources for our Summer School workshops.
Monday, June 27th
# Workshop by Clementine Vaultier, a French artist based in Brussels. In her work she is focusing on containers of warmth and heat as part of an expanded ceramic practice. Clementine organised a workshop with clay as a tool to develop other ways of thinking, collaborating. As an embodied practice her clay workshop was inspired by Elisée Reclus’ geography teachings. He promoted gathering and working with clay as a mapping tool to get to know the landscape based on experience rather than from abstract learning with 2D maps and books. We worked the clay with hands and feet and created a collective piece that we carried to the seaside on Horneks coast where we returned it to the water on the last day of the Summer School on Læsø.
# Workshop by Filip Van Dingenen, a multidisciplinary Brussels-based artist and co-founder of the Ecole Mondiale. Filip presented the Algae Diplomacy Platform at Horneks coast. In a playful way the Platform for Algae Diplomacy studies seaweed rights and seaweed spirits, develops protocols & prototyping for an Algae Diplomacy, and presents seaweed rituals and algae narratives.
In the workshop the cutting and collecting of algae created resources for food and collective audio workshops.
# Performance by Justin Bennett using sounds generated with salt and seaweed at Asger Jorn’s house, mixed with improvisations inspired by a sound piece created by Asger Jorn & Jean Dubuffet. Their legendary Musique Phénomenale , was originally issued in an edition of 50 copies in 1961. As the main protagonist of the Art Brut movement Dubuffet was interested in music as a creative vehicle and as an experimental practice working with people playing instruments they don’t really know how to use. This is how he came to create Musique Phénomenale with Asger Jorn, a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International.
Tuesday, June 28th
# Sound workshop with Justin Bennett. We did a series of exercises on listening and making sound notations. Together we created a sound piece based on our collective breathing exercises.
# Presentation by Rodrigo Ghattas-Peréz, an artist, organizer, activist and restivist formerly based in Oslo, now in Lima. Rodrigo presented his research and activities on potential practices of wealth distribution in online and offline organisational forms (DAO, DISCO, cooperatives…). As a ‘restivist’ he resists over-production in the arts and wishes to improve economic conditions for artists living abroad.
# Artist conversation with Vincent Meessen and Anne Møller Christensen after a screening of the film Wild Architect (anonymous). The film reflects on Jorn’s and the Situationists practices. A discussion on the contemporary recuperation of Situationists’ and Nashist (Jorn’s brother) actions and strategies followed the screening.
Wednesday, June 29th
# Workshop on self-organisation and distributed cooperative organisations with skal, f.eks. and Jubilee.
# Collective action: returning the clay landscape-sculpture to the beach at Horneks and dissolving the landscape in the sea. Creating a collective breathing sound piece on the beach recorded by Justin Bennett.
# Feedback and conclusions of the Summer School.
June 25th – June 29th
Temporary exhibitions, and a permanent display of Jorn ephemera (materials kindly lent by Jakob Jakobsen).
Summer School Participants
Justin Bennett, Maria Francesca De Tullio, Rodrigo Ghattas-Peréz, Noah Holtegaard, Sara Løvschall Grøntved, Vincent Meessen, Anne Møller Christensen, Rikke Ehlers Nilsson, Scott William Raby, Filip Van Dingenen, Julie van Elslande, Jesse van Winden, Clémentine Vaultier, Vermeir & Heiremans.
With the support of The Danish Arts Foundation, North Denmark Region, Kulturkanten, Ny Carlsbergfondet, and 15. Juni Fonden.
f.eks. is a roaming exhibition platform for contemporary art that seeks to generate critical and speculative dialogues between audiences, artists, and broader publics. f.eks. produces temporary art events that are located in and around the urban spaces of Aalborg and the Northern Jutland region – activating architecture, infrastructure, ecological sites, and public spaces through a series of live art engagements. These include performances, talks, workshops, readings, pop-ups, social installations, screenings, and many other forms of interactive and ephemeral art making.
Skal Contemporary is an exhibition platform for contemporary art in Vendsyssel, Denmark presenting site specific contemporary art projects based on the surroundings and the local spirit: nature, people, and traditions in light of contemporary frameworks and trends. SKAL Contemporary’s artistic projects consist of exhibitions, performances, and socially engaging art projects that all relate to human interaction with our environment and nature in one way or another.
Empowering Artist-run Spaces
Collective reflection trajectory in collaboration with other artist-run organisations and independent artists. How do collectives empower their members, audiences and others facing the same or similar problems?
In an era of neoliberalism, it is difficult for artists, as for many groups, to hold their own in the free market. Especially in the context of gentrification it can be expensive to find living and/or working space. It is attractive to try to find solutions collectively, even if it is a lot of work, because there are many advantages in return: being part of a network and the accompanying exchanges, for example, and sometimes, hopefully, affordable space. It can strengthen our artistic, economic, social, and/or political positions. Then, how do these collectives empower their members, audiences and others facing the same or similar problems?
Such empowerment does not have to be an answer to gentrification, or even related to it, in order to be important for quite many people. Still, the ways in which artist-run structures do so are not necessarily well known. Kunstenpunt, Timelab (Ghent) and Level Five (Brussels) have already conducted projects that map out workspaces and practices. Always with different objectives, methods and focus, but still with a certain degree of overlap. With them, we started a dialogue about a trajectory that would focus on specific needs of the different initiatives – asking for exchange, information, support, etc.
Jubilee organised the workshop Empowering Artist-run Spaces for SOTA (in the sessions for their Fair Arts Almanac) in July 2020, on behalf of the project Permanent, about artists’ initiatives and how they empower their members, audiences and others. Based on the reactions to our invitations and from the participants, but also from our own interest and motivation, we quickly realised that this activity needed a follow-up. Currently, Jubilee is organising small-scale public work sessions through the Brussels Artist-run Network where this theme is presented to artists (initiatives). First results will be processed and published in SOTA’s Fair Arts Almanac 2022.
We define ‘artist-run spaces’ quite broadly: these can be presentation spaces or shared studios, but also collectives without a specific space. We think that such structures can be considered ‘mini-societies.’ We are interested in ways in which quite numerous collectives of artists and art workers are inventing and using ways to make a difference for themselves and others, precisely despite the ever-growing focus on life quality for the privileged, and quantitative valorisation of people as data and capital. A growth that will make more and more artists and other less privileged people think about ways to work in a more helpful manner.
Sounding Public Space
A collective research project
Sound (audio) is a medium that can move from inside to the outside. Artists and researchers can use audio in exhibition spaces, theatres and concert-halls, in public spaces, virtual spaces and the private space of the home. The form of an audio-walk can move through all these kinds of spaces. The audience moves through a place while listening to an audio soundtrack. This can contain spoken text, music, sound effects, field recordings. It can be pre-recorded, interactive or streamed via internet or radio, but in effect the sounds are always located, “mapped” onto the city or landscape itself. In the city, a text can be spread out all along a street, or an abandoned lot can be filled with a virtual sonorous ritual.
Jubilee is developing the audiowalking app Tracks in collaboration with other partners. This allows a listener to explore content of very different kinds made for specific locations. For the artist / researcher / musician it forms a tool for spatial composition, for archiving and linking sounds or spoken texts to specific buildings, or to the movement of the listener. In addition to this individual form of presentation, Jubilee is interested in reflecting on more collective forms such as group walks.
The research considers the existing sonic environments of public space in relation to artistic research and interventions in public space. This research can involve local experts (inhabitants), urbanists, architects, policy makers, sociologists, ecologists as well as artists, writers, performers, musicians and field recordists. The idea is that not only artistic work but also research and reflection can be mapped back into public space itself.
In May 2021 Jubilee hosted Listening in the time of Corona an public online discussion between sound artists based in Brussels, Flanders and The Netherlands about the impact of the pandemic on the soundscape and, through listening, on the life and work of the participants.
Emptor
An artistic research on the ecology of artistic practice
Emptor, a chapter that is being set up from 2021 onwards by Jubilee, continues along the methodology and efforts of Jubilee’s collective research project Caveat, actively applying the practice-based approach to ‘property’, an element that highly defines the economy of visual arts. Just as ‘the contract’ functioned as a filter and landing stage in Caveat, ‘property’ functions as a central notion, linking different discussions and research trajectories.
Opening the question: How can we practice ‘property’ for a sustainable visual arts field? Emptor has the ambition to collectively question our positions in the economy of the arts today and open up new narratives that create space for reflection and action. Defining what is the artwork, how it can be exhibited, conserved and sold is an ever more delicate and complex question within today’s visual art practice – as it is often collaborative, performative, internet-based, audiovisual, immaterial in its form. However, property of this artwork still remains the central element in its economy.
Even if visual art practices challenge roles on the field by setting conditions for materialisation or acquisition, the notion of ownership itself always remains. Discussions rarely focus on collaboration but circle around ownership of a material object (artwork, contract, display, protocol).
Remarkably enough, and despite all the avant-garde positions that artists occupy, the economy of the art world functions by the same principle as the larger economy: private property. Seth Siegelaub, the New York gallerist and curator who caused a furor with the introduction of an artist contract in the late 1960s, already wrote in one of his letters that he could not understand why: “…artists, you have allowed the sale of your art to be the only way to receive direct compensation from the use of your art.”
60 years later, the same problems are still present. Taking into account the many urges that confront our society today, Emptor thinks it is the right moment to put ownership issues back at the center of discussion. Carefully selected artistic practices and their inspiration will feed reflections within Assemblies of Practice and Reading Rooms, allowing for common concerns to come to the surface.
Through collaborations with arts organisations and researchers from legal and arts fields, Emptor aims at translating these concerns to daily artistic and legal practice, and acting upon them in dialogue.
By actively using mapping and co-writing as tools throughout the collective research, questions will be extrapolated to other domains, contextualised and accessible for the public through the website. In so doing, Emptor continues the quest for a shift from an economy to an ecology of the arts together with all those concerned.
Artists involved so far are Kobe Matthys (Agency/Agentschap/Agence), Katya Ev, Ciel Grommen & Maximiliaan Royakkers, Grace Ndiritu, Vermeir & Heiremans, and Clémentine Vaultier.
Reflection partners include: a.pass (Brussels), BUDA (Kortrijk), CIAP/FLACC (Genk), Kunsthal Gent.
As Emptor continues the methodology of Caveat, taking its concepts to a different perspective, the Emptor activities and trajectories are part of the existing Caveat project website.
