Archipelago of Artistic Practices. A Jubilee and M HKA Research Summit
14-21 Jun 2025
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, performances, presentations and conversations.
Including 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), 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, Raphael Pirenne, Katrien Reist, Emily Rosamond, Julie Vanderhaegen, Julie van Elslande, Piet Van Hecke, Tobias van Royen, Jesse van Winden, Danielle van Zuijlen
Art organisations and collectives: Agency, Atelier Cartographique, BARN Core Team of the Brussels Artist-Run Network, Bureau of Analogies, f.eks., Kenniscentrum Coöperatief Ondernemen, Kunsthal Gent, nadine, NICC, Re-Connect Festival, Seasonal Neighbours, State of the Arts (SOTA).
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 during the opening evening of the exhibition (Thursday 12 June), and then centres around four thematic days, addressing: The Geopolitics of Infrastructure (14 June), The Infrastructure of Archives (15 June), Archipelago of Artistic Practices (20 June), and Mapping and Performing Infrastructure (21 June). Extra Muros: there will be a Reading Room and a Live Conversation at Out of Sight (16 and 19 June).
The Research Summit focuses on the premise of ‘learning by doing’. Collective interventions and moments of constructive reflection, including 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.
Currently under development through a partnership with nadine and Atelier Cartographique, Jubilee named Eavatea after a word noted 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 also 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.
The discursive programme 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 connected 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 embodies.
Practical information
The Research Summit takes place 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 is presented 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 the following link. You can register for all or some days.
Language: English
More info
More info about the summit in our brochure.
About Eavatea and Jubilee
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 and Kunsthal Gent’s development programme Permanently Practicing. 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 Brussels (VGC).
Programme
Thursday 12 June 2025, 18:00 – 21:00
Performing Eavatea
Location: M HKA, INBOX, 5th floor
The prism of this Research Summit is Eavatea, a new collaborative research tool for in-situ artistic research. To bring these situated practices from their lived environments first to the virtual dynamics of Eavatea and now into an institutional context, is a good occasion to make them breathe and speak again. We will do this with the invited guests and with the audience. On the opening evening of The Geopolitics of Infrastructure we get a taste of such transitions of art projects from their situated contexts, to the internet-based Eavatea tool, to a museum experience – and back again: what do elements of cross-border artistic research smell, taste and feel like?
Live events during M HKA’s opening:
19:00 Production of Eavatea shards: melting caramel, cooling, breaking, scanning
20:00 Performance: Filip van Dingenen and Hélène Meyer, The Platform for Algae Diplomacy (offering algae soup & bites)
Saturday 14 June 2025, 11:00 – 18:00
Geopolitics of Infrastructures
Location: M HKA, 6th floor
Artistic practices today evoke and question the potential of infrastructure—its symbolic power, political weight and capacity to shape the human world. These vast networks, whilst driving modernisation, national ambition and influence, also fuel geopolitical complexities, and social and environmental degradation.
In this programme, we interrogate the role of infrastructure in statecraft and the building of worldviews, exploring its trans-boundary frictions. A number of the artistic projects included in The Geopolitics of Infrastructure exhibition are presented: research-based artistic practices that critique and reimagine infrastructural models, considering how geopolitics shapes both the conditions of artistic work and the possibilities of creative imagination.
11:00 Small introduction to Archipelago of Artistic Practices, a Research Summit
11:15 Mirwan Andan & Iswanto Hartano (ruangrupa) in conversation with Vincent Meessen and Nav Haq
12:45 Lunch
13:30 Shahana Rajani, Pejvak, Assem Hendawi. Conversation moderated by Nav Haq
15:00 Screening The Mountain Speaks to the Sea, Tekla Aslanishvili, 2024, 59′
16:30 Tekla Aslanishvili, Köken Ergun, Zheng Mahler. Conversation moderated by Nick Axel
Sunday 15 June 2025, 11:00 – 18:00
The Infrastructure of Archives
Location: M HKA, 6th floor
The subtle rules and pathways of archives enable our connections to the histories that they safeguard. While the aesthetics of the archive may be perceived as neutral, objective and administrative, they govern our relationships to their contents. These repositories of research are a natural terrain for artists to activate, cultivate, challenge and transform.
Eavatea was conceived as a dynamic archive. Inspired by Tupaia’s wayfinding with its attention to a pluriverse of changing perspectives and narratives, Eavatea was never considered as a fixed archive of practices. Uploaded projects, images, documents can be reactivated and shared. The tool especially aims to open up new connections between its uploaded content and thus generate new narratives.
Content uploaded on Eavatea becomes testimony of an agency that goes beyond one artist or one organisation. They are part of, and generate, multiple narratives rather than being merely one document in a database, which in the end is merely an accumulation of autonomous documents. The documents in Eavatea become ‘relational’ objects.
14:00 Julie van Elslande & Louise de Bethune elaborate on a series of Things from the archive of Agency, that draw a parallel between the legal questions they raise, such as (co-)authorship, and how these are equally of interest for Eavatea
15:30 Sturm & Lie present Panagia Gorgoepikoos, an artist book and exhibition produced in 2021 but based on a 1991-93 project by Åsa Lie & Jadran Sturm
16:30 Collective Reflection on Eavatea as an archive. Participants: Jubilee artists, Louise De Bethune and Julie van Elslande, Jesse van Winden, Evi Bert, Åsa Lie & Merzedes Sturm Lie (Sturm & Lie Foundation), Raphael Pirenne (Agency)
Friday 20 June 2025, 11:00 – 18:30
Cooperative infrastructures
Location: M HKA, 6th floor
As an infrastructure of innovation and commoning, Eavatea brings production, distribution and financing into novel alignments. The interface generates a continuously growing digital common pool resource, the outcome of an agora of in-person-meetings where artists discuss, make choices and upload individual and collective practices on Eavatea. This co-curating process not only generates collective knowledge, but also gives Eavatea an important social dimension. It transforms a self-organised digital infrastructure into a commoning practice, which generates the commons that needs to be collectively governed to ensure its sustainability and preservation. We question if the cooperative model can offer an economic and governance model that serves the needs of the various stakeholders.
11:00 Keynote: The Multi-stakeholder Cooperative and the dissemination of Eavatea – Johannes Grillet (KCO, Knowledge Centre for Cooperative Entrepreneurship, KU Leuven)
11:30 Conversation with Johannes Grillet moderated by Vermeir & Heiremans
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Roundtable Archipelago of Artistic Practices: discussion with members of possible future user groups of Eavatea
- Partners that co-produced Eavatea. They could become the first circle of autonomous users: Atelier Cartographique, nadine, f.eks. 2. Possible future user groups from
- The arts sector: Artists: Brussels Artist-Run Network, Seasonal Neigbours, SOTA; Art institutions: f.eks., Kunsthal Gent/ Openbare Werken Festival, NICC, CKV,
M HKA, Kanal. - Possible future user groups from the educational sector:
Re-Connect (Iranian online performing arts academy); School of Equals (LUCA).
16:00 Vermeir & Heiremans, 7 Walks (Help U Zelven). Starting at M HKA, a short walk exploring the cooperative activities in the vicinity of the museum
Saturday 21 June 2025, 11:00 – 18:00
Mapping infrastructures of artistic practices
Location: M HKA, 6th floor
Eavatea was originally conceived as a ‘mapping tool’ that could go beyond the strictly ‘georeferential’ conventions of cartography that claim objectivity while visualising certain information and obscuring other. The work of the 19th century anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus is still today inspiring in that respect. Many research practices, artistic and otherwise, are occupied precisely with unveiling the infrastructures that shape and reshape our understanding of the world and life that takes place in it. But on the other hand, Eavatea is also proposing an alternative mode of operating. The installation of a tool that distributes transdisciplinary and research-based practices through a collective artistic engagement reflects how it can be used as a common and pluriverse infrastructure. Eavatea can thus become an agora within the broader arts field, a motor of encounters on- and offline, for setting up research communities and new forms of exchange.
11:00 Keynote: Élisée Reclus, Social Art and Cartography – Federico Ferretti (Professor of Geography, University of Bologna)
11:30 Conversation with Federico Ferretti moderated by Vermeir & Heiremans
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Keynote: Sabeth Buchmann (Head of the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna)
14:15 Conversation with Sabeth Buchmann moderated by Ronny Heiremans and Vincent Meessen
15:00 Performance: Fermentation and Speculation in Art and Wild Ale – Bureau of Analogies (Tobias Van Royen & Scott William Raby)
16:30 Keynote Lecture: Emily Rosamond, “Performing Infrastructure”
17:30 Sound performance: Justin Bennett, an infra-sonic journey – sounding the infrastructure of New Babylon – listening to utopian infrastructures – a parallel trip through Eavatea and New Babylon
Extra muros
Location: Out of Sight, Somersstraat 31, 2018 Antwerp
Monday 16 June 2025, 18:00 – 21:00
Reading Room: 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 a text to reframe notions of ‘institutional critique’. Exceptionally, this Reading Room does not take place at Agency’s Praticauthèque, but at Out of Sight.
Kobe Matthys (aka: Agency / Agence / Agentschap) was 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 opened 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 will provide 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.
Thursday 19 June 2025, 19:30 – 21:00
Archipelago of Artistic Practices: Live Conversation
Conversation with members of Eavatea partner organisations Jubilee, nadine, Atelier Cartographique and f.eks. at Out of Sight, Antwerp
Spaces for artistic work are crucial for artists and precious for ecosystems of cultural life. Their availability, affordability and quality differ heavily and are ever more under pressure in neoliberal contexts. With Eavatea, Jubilee initiated such an infrastructure for development and collaboration, even if its basis is online. How can different kinds of environments for artistic work be shared, maintained, used sustainably, collectively and generatively?
Live Conversations are part of Eavatea’s co-initiator nadine’s curated activities in collaboration with artists and or partners. The conversations focus on specific topics or practices affiliated with nadine. This fourth Live Conversation is organised in the context of Jubilee’s 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. During this live conversation Eavatea’s partners reflect on ways in which an extended community of actors can create an economic model for Eavatea, using their own versions of the tool.
In the company of Dušica Dražić (artist and independent curator), we will visit the exhibition currently on view, followed by an informal discussion (max. 25 ppl) on sustainable models of support for these artistic initiatives, and how we can maintain them collectively offline and online.
In 2025, Jubilee is supported through M HKA’s participation in the L’Internationale programme Museum of the Commons and Kunsthal Gent’s development programme Permanently Practicing. 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 Brussels (VGC).
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.
