Jubilee’s 2025-26 cycle of Reading Rooms focuses on the book collection of artist Kobe Matthys (1970–2023). This tenth reading session is the first where the guest is invited by Agency: Amit Leblang. She selected fragments from Scandals of translation: towards an ethics of difference by Lawrence Venuti (1998). At Agency’s Praticauthèque, Brussels
26/03/2026, 18-20:30h

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. The collaboration between Jubilee and Agency evolves into a co-curation of the Reading Rooms at the Praticauthèque, taking care of their programme alternately. Reading Room #48 is the first to be proposed by Agency: Amit Leblang is one of six artist-researchers working at and with Agency’s Praticotheque in 2026-2027.

Amit Leblang (1994) is a Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and teacher, whose work spans video, sculpture, installation, printmaking, and text. Her work investigates translation as both methodology and material—a movement between languages that alters meanings and exposes emotional and cultural undertones. Guided by philosophical and political questions, Leblang deals with the tensions between intimacy and distance, documentation and staging, tenderness and control.