Agency

Practices foster their own force, making present what causes practitioners to think, feel and act. Agency, an international non-profit organization founded in 1992 with a base in Brussels, aims at caring for practices beyond their singular modes of existence. 

The world’s ecological crisis has rekindled a growing interest in inter-dependencies and the ‘milieus’ we all depend upon. Every milieu has properties. To inhabit a milieu means to reciprocally adapt to its properties. 

This resurgence of common properties stands in contrast with the current definition of property in law as exclusive ownership. The tragedy is that since the modern enclosure movement in the 15th century the two divergent notions of property, property as a set of characteristics of a milieu and property as exclusive ownership, are totally drifting apart. 

The loss of milieus of art practices inside global property regimes is alarming. Concerns raised by artists exemplify the different issues at stake. Many artists become more and more vigilant about these regimes of property and look into alternatives. 

The colonial concept of property relies upon the fundamental assumption of the split between culture and nature and consequently between expressions and ideas, creations and facts, subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, originality and tradition, individuals and collectives, mind and body, etc.

Agency constitutes a growing list of ‘boundary things’ that resist the radical split between the classifications of nature and culture. This list is mostly derived from controversies and juridical cases about property from the start of the enclosures of the commons around the 15th century until today, from various territories of world-integrated capitalism.

Agency invokes these boundary things from its list in varying ‘assemblies’, which combine various formats of exhibition, performance and publication. Each assembly fabulates around possible mutual forms of inclusion of a singular practice and pays attention to the operative consequences of the apparatus of property for the ecology of that practice.

Agency aims to reintroduce the notion of properties as milieu in defense of a political ecology, which assumes a coexistence and co-becoming as the habitat for practices.

Since Kobe Matthys, founder of Agency, passed away, a collective is pursuing the practice of Agency.

Agency – Thing 001359 (Chico Mendez Mural Garden)

• Assembly Sunday June 22 at 3 pm @ Field & live on Radio Fantôme
• Field

On the occasion of The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, Agency summons Thing 001359 (Chico Mendez Mural Garden) in order to bear witness.

On December 31 1997, Chico Mendez Mural Garden, a community garden located in the Lower East Side in New York, was bulldozed under real estate pressure initiated by the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani. This garden was created by inhabitants and artists early 90s in the memory of the Brazilian eco-activist Chico Mendez murdered by loggers in 1988.

The garden was constituting a kind of ecosystem where the diversity of the plants interacted with the works of arts, mainly mural paintings and a large linear sculpture representing a body in a graffiti style, made with the plants of the area. In order to protect the garden from destruction, the community launched a defense procedure arguing that the whole ecosystem should be considered as an artwork.

In 2010 Agency already proposed to present Thing 001359 (Chico Mendez Mural Garden) as a permanent garden at the site of the bulldozed forest Lappersfort, situated south of Bruges by the canal to Ghent. The proposal was less to make an exact reproduction of the Chico Mendez Mural Garden in the way the garden ”was at a certain frozen moment in time” and more to let Thing 001359 become.

At Buda, Vilvoorde, Thing 001359 (Chico Mendez Mural Garden) will take off from there where the garden was left behind in New York. The map of the lot of the bulldozed garden will be lay-out on a 1 to 1 scale on the Buda field, determining the space of the Assembly which will be organized on June 22 at 3 pm and will gather people for a fabulation from and around the controversy.

Guests: Andreas De Boer (TBC), Sari Depreeuw, Wouter De Raeve, Lise Duclaux, Bram Van Cauwenberghe, Allan Wei.
Moderation: Christophe Meierhans
Scenography: Wim Cuyvers
Research, preparation, production : Wim Cuyvers, Raphaël Pirenne, Jesse Van Winden, with the assistance of Katrien Reist and Julie Van Elslande and the curatorial team of The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet. The assembly was partly developed in the framework of the “Pilootprojecten nalatenschapen kunstenerfgoed” program supported by the Flemish Community. In that framework, Agency received the methodological support of the CKV (Nele Luyts) and MHKA (Evi Bert), a workshop was organized with people from erg and elsewhere. Thanks to Diego Thielemans, Alice Mahiant, Michael Murtaugh for their participation.
Production: Agency and Border Buda
With the support of Border Buda, Jubilee, the Flemish Government and VGC.

Language of the assembly: English, Dutch and French
Please note that even with bad weather conditions the Assembly will be organized outside.

The archive of the Mendez Mural Community Garden is accessible here : https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/fales/mss_100

Agency – Cette parcelle n’est pas à vendre (2005-2006)

• Fobrux

In 2005, a group of researchers with backgrounds in architecture, urbanism, theory, art and design, conveyed by Wim Cuyvers, traveled to Brazzaville and Kinshasa, two cities in the Congo region. These cities, trying to recover from war situations, are each other’s mirror image, with the Congo River as the dividing line. The goal of the trip was to map Brazzaville and Kinshasa in an alternative way.

They studied a variety of subjects: diamond trade, the UN presence, the Congo River, street children, mobile phone advertisements, street trading, traffic circles, land ownership disputes, public space and the remnants of colonial housing projects. These phenomena were employed as visual indicators to read the urban environment and were eventually translated into numerous maps. As they considered Brazzaville and Kinshasa as one city, they decided to name it Brakin. Brakin: Brazzaville – Kinshasa : Visualizing the Visible was also the title of the consecutive publication published in 2006.

As part of this research, Agency looked into the land ownership of several buildings on which “cette parcelle n’est pas à vendre (this land is not for sale)” (or some variation thereof) was written on the façade. Agency photographed this slogan for each building, and then mapped its ownership situation, use and the applicable legal frameworks. For The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, Agency’s contribution for the book is reworked into posters, fixed to the façade of the Fobrux building.