Brussels Artist-Run Network

The Brussels Artist-Run Network (BARN) was founded in 2020 to have a stronger, collective voice during the covid crisis. Operating without a structure of formal membership, the network in principle includes all Brussels artists, art workers and bottom-up initiatives run by artists, independent curators, architects, and other cultural practitioners. The BARN Core Team facilitates connections in this ecosystem, focusing on sharing information and knowledge, community building, research, and advocacy.

Jubilee has been a crucial partner since the beginning. Jubilee’s coordinator Jesse van Winden co-founded the Brussels Artist-Run Network from a drive to have a more comprehensive understanding of Brussels’ thriving artist run scene. Itself an artist-run initiative, Jubilee has managed BARN’s budgets, shared its communication, and integrated it in the collective practices that it supports and follows.

From the start, the Brussels Artist-Run telegram group has been a central forum to find out what events are going on, to ask questions and come up with answers, to offer and find workspace, housing, jobs, residencies, to ask the community for help, etc. At the moment it has 26 thematic subgroups and more than 3200 members of all artistic disciplines, and continues growing rapidly.

The Brussels artist-run scene is a rich, wild, diverse and hyperactive universe that isn’t always easy to navigate – even for those who are part of it.

A monthly newsletter goes out to 148 independent artist-run and curator-run initiatives and a wealth of individuals.

The BARN Core Team facilitates dynamics on this broad network, working for a culture of solidarity and empowerment by focusing on four key areas: Sharing information and resources, Community building, Research, and Advocacy.

The BARN Core Team does long-term practice-based research across the entire body of the network. Collective intelligence is channeled iteratively through the circulation of knowledge, strategies, needs, dreams and survival tactics of artist-run initiatives. Through the evolving network of connections and information, the BARN Core Team aims to function as facilitators, creating time, space and opportunities for artists, art workers and artist-run initiatives to connect. developing and refining tools, knowledge and other collective proposals for work and reflection.

1. SHARING INFORMATION AND RESOURCES

We facilitate the exchange of information, resources, and knowledge both locally and internationally. Our initiatives include:
• A monthly newsletter that highlights public moments as well as non-event announcements by the broader network. There is a separate section for news and announcements by the BARN Core Team.
• A rapidly growing, vivid Telegram group forms and supports the community and actualises the agency of the network. It has many subgroups (events, jobs, working space, living space, knowledge sharing, the art workers attest, residencies, subsidies, parenthood, etc).
• An interactive open-source website showcasing news, mapping artist-run initiatives, and sharing research by the BARN core team.
• Continuous informal networking, connecting and bridge-building: in-person and through email: contact@brusselsartistrun.net

2. COMMUNITY BUILDING

We create time and space for artists to come together, fostering environments of solidarity, trust, and care. Activities include:
• Biking/walking tours visiting two to four different artist-run spaces in a neighbourhood.
• Hangouts without specific programme, easy access occasions to hang out and get to know other people.
• Artist-Run Open Mike where anyone from the artist-run scene can take the floor to present themselves, introduce a project, ask for feedback on an idea, talk about their challenges, news, and more.
• In 2024, the BARN Core Team organised an International Artist-Run Hangout with colleague artist-run networks from Amsterdam, Berlin, Liege, Venice and Prague – having made elaborate visits to the latter two.
• In 2027, the BARN Core Team wants to organise a Belgian Artist-Run Hangout to bring together the people behind artist-run initiatives all over the country, to get to know each other, learn from each others experiences, challenges and solutions, and discuss the unique position the artist-run scene has in the ecology of the arts. This Hangout will be co-organised with other artist-run initiatives, and shall be part of OFFestival, an artist-run festival that BARN was already part of in 2026.

The BARN Core Team maps the network by asking what initiatives do: how do you manage, what are your motivations, what resources do you have (space, equipment, software, special skills, knowledge, contacts, etc), what do you need, what have you learnt, what do you not want to happen, what are your dreams?

3. RESEARCH

We research the artist-run scene: what initiatives exist, how do they work, what can we learn from them, what can we help them with? Activities include:
• A mapping of Brussels’ artist-run initiatives, mapping spaces, financial and legal setups, and community dynamics: a soft inventory of the Brussels Artist-Run Network
• Research linked to the Artist Workspace Memorandum 2025-2030 (see below): statistics and experience of the strengths and needs of Brussels’ artist scene, policy gaps in Brussels, policy in other cities, good and bad practices, etc.
• Brussels Artist-Run Reader: compiled to give context to the importance of affordable, qualitative and long-term workspace for artists in Brussels, a city that is becoming increasingly expensive.

4. ADVOCACY

We explore ways to unite actors so that we can speak with one voice on critical issues. Initiatives include:
• Spaces for Spaces: The Value of Space for Artistic work, a series of thematic conversations with artist interventions. Presently focusing on mapping the value of workspaces from artistic and social rather than financial points of view.
• A collective Artist Workspace Memorandum 2025-2030 to send to elected officials and municipal administrations (later also to regional ones), asking to develop policy for workspaces for artists and arts workers, studio collectives, laboratories and so on. Such policies around our places of production hardly exist yet. We are working on a much more profound Policy Support Document too.

We often explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it voluntarily by pointing out that “we’re doing it for fun and friendship”. Because BARN is about exchange, empowerment, and fun!

BARN CORE TEAM

The BARN Core Team is a group of people who want to help making things happen for the wider, amorphous artistic scene – the ‘Brussels Artist-Run Network’. Currently Est Fantuzzi, Milan Gillard, Lars-Herman Hegg, Eszter Némethi, Mariana Pechackova, and Jesse Van Winden form the BARN Core Team. We are always looking for team members! Contact us on contact@brusselsartistrun.net!