Glossary

(have a look at How do we define Agency?)

Agency

Agency is the generic name of a Brussels-based agency that was established in 1992.
Agency constitutes a growing list of things that resist the split between the classifications of “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’, etc...
Agency invokes things from it’s list in varying assemblies.

Agency VZW/ASBL

Agency vzw/asbl was founded in 2019 by artist and activist Kobe Matthys (1970–2023) together with a group of people to support the activity of Agency as a practice. The organisation’s purpose is 'to explore the interference of the apparatus of intellectual property law for an ecology of artistic practices and to revive a sustainable diversity of practices.'

Assembly

Agency invokes things from it’s list in varying assemblies. Each assembly speculates on one or multiple questions.
Agency organises those assemblies in the context of exhibitions, publications or performances for which some of the things are selected. People with a variety of profiles, chosen by Agency, are invited to these meetings. These guests are selected on the basis of their skills or their sectors of activity, and are called upon to participate in a speculative discussion on a thing. Lawyers, artists, workers, activists, researchers and others come together to reactivate the debate in a performative manner.

Examples of these speculative questions are:

• What if “things” like bodies, collectives, commons, temporalities, ideas, facts, non-humans, objects, other-than-humans, etc... become included within art practices?
• How can folklore and traditional knowledge be incorporated in the practice of art and science ?
• ...

Those speculative questions explore in a topological way the operative consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property for art practices and their modes of existence.

In order to think through the “middle”, it is necessary to redefine how the relations between the micro and the macro are assembled in each instance. In other words, the meso or “middle” is about everything that the macro does not accommodate, and anything that the micro does not permit to be deduced. Every assembly looks topically at how various relations between the micro and the macro are intertwined at the instances of a controversy.

Each controversy witnesses how a practice fosters its own force, making present what causes practitioners to think, feel and act.

Box document

A box document is a printed document that is found in the box of a thing.
As jurisprudence is also a printed document, and as specimens are sometimes printed as well, care must be taken to distinguish them from the box documents.

Co-Post

Co-Post is a co-owned building established in 2015, located on the 2nd and 3rd floors of 18 rue Theodore Verhaegen in Saint-Gilles, in the former post office sorting facilities. The renovation project, initiated by fifteen artists, comprises nine lofts and a shared unit. The project's core values ​​are community and social responsibility. The renovation of the apartments is based on the use of natural and reclaimed materials. The project won the 2017 Be Circular Award.

Copyright

See intellectual property.

Document

In the Praticothèque, there are two kinds of documents : library documents, which are in the library, and box documents, which can be found in the box of a thing.
Documents have different types:

Book	comprehensive work, fiction or non-fiction, on hardcover or paperback
Booklet	small book, brochure or group of pages
Card	image or text printed on a card, intended to be mailed
Catalog	book that lists many things
Conference proceedings	collection of academic papers published on the occasion of an academic conference
Exhibition catalog	book that lists artists and/or artworks of an exhibition
Flyer	single sheet, unfolded, designed for very fast, cheap, and broad distribution
Leaflet	single sheet, folded at least once, designed for quick reading and high-volume distribution
Manual	book giving instructions
Master thesis	academic work written as part of a master
Museum guide	book providing informations about a museum, designed for visitors
Periodical	an issue of a serial publication such as newspapers, journals, magazines
Program	informations for a public about planned series of activities
Reader	collection of selected texts on a specific subject and serving educational purposes
Tape	record on audio or video tape

Editathon

An edit-a-thon is an event organized within a community to edit and improve an online knowledge database.

Intellectual property

Intellectual property encompasses patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc...
Artists obtain intellectual property rights over the fruits of their labor via copyrights.
Copyrights protect original forms of literary, scientific and artistic works.
The first national copyright laws saw the light in the 18th Century. Although there exists a difference in the point of view, between the English "copyright" and the French "droit d'auteur" we usually use the term copyright. Copyright protection first applied to writing in relation to the technological invention of the printing press, but it extended to other media like for example engravings, drawings, paintings and sculptures, by way of analogy with what had already received protection of the law. In 1886, the Berne Convention was first adopted to harmonize the various national copyright laws in European countries.
And in 1994, the TRIPS agreement was installed in the Berne Convention in the 147 signatory countries of the World Trade Organisation.

For the purpose of evaluating intellectual properties during legal proceedings, a judge employs divisions between general categories such as body and mind, collective and individual, common and original, ephemeral and fixed, idea and expression, fact and creation, non-human and human, object and subject, other-than human and human, etc...
These categories proceed from the bifurcation of nature in the classification ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.

Index

In a book, an index is a list of names or subjects with reference to the page on which they are mentioned.
In some documents in the library, Kobe wrote his personal index onto the last pages.

Library document

A library document is a document sitting on the shelves of the library.
Most of these documents are printed documents like books, leaflets etc.
To a lesser extent, there are also miscellaneous documents such as tapes and CDs.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is the free and open source wiki software we use for Agency wiki.

Praticothèque

The Praticothèque is the ensemble of the space, the List of things and the library. An environment built to allow research, debate and alliance between practices.

"Just like there is a herbothèque with herbs or a bibliothèque with books, we have a praticothèque with practices. The boxes contain traces of practices and the ways in which practitioners defend ecologies or these practices’ modes of existence, which mostly happens when there is a problem or controversy. The praticothèque is Agency’s depot for research, composed in cooperation with other researchers."

In 2026 Agency ASBL is running a project, supported by the VG, to open up the Praticotheque to other practices and the public. Recurrent visits, edit-a-thons, reading rooms and unboxing will be organised and Agency ASBL facilitates the research and work of 6 artists working with the material of and at Praticotheque with the intention to grow practice-based!

Presentation text

A presentation text is a short summary of the controversy by Agency, produced to present a thing to the public.

Publication text

A publication text is a short summary of a controversy produced by Agency to present a thing to the public.
These 'publication texts' are longer than 'presentation texts' and are intended to be read together in an assembly, as a start for a speculative reading of the case.

Specimen

In the Praticotheque, the notion of 'specimen' refers to the object of a controversy.
'Specimen's, or guidelines to have access to them, are collected, together with their jurisprudence.

Thing or boundary thing

Agency constitutes an ongoing list of controversies linked to copyright, authorship and intellectual property, that witness hesitation in terms of the bifurcation in the classification ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.
Agency calls those controversies "boundary-things", things that are on a border. Those boundary-things question the binary division between the common and the original, the ephemeral and the fixed, the idea and the expression, the human and the non-human, which are categories used in copyright law. These divisions can be summarized in a single one: that which opposes culture to nature. However, many practices are difficult to classify according to these two categories alone.

The controversies are from a period between the 17th century until today and from various territories around the world. Due to their ambiguous status, boundary-things bear witness to the redefinitions of law and its bifurcations.
The documentation related to the things comes from case law (jurisprudence), but also from press articles. These are sometimes accompanied by the object of the dispute (specimen), if it is material and if it has been possible to collect it. Everything related to a dispute is placed in a numbered wooden box and stored on mobile shelving.

They cover topics as diverse as :

• • mysticism :
    • Thing 001621 - Dead Son Drawn by Psychic Artist
    • Can a portrait made by a medium be an original work of art ?

• • design and elementary shapes :
    • Thing 001009 - Koosh
    • Is the Koosh ball round ?

• • postcolonial studies :
    • Thing 000779 - Bionicles
    • Can Maori legends, culture and language be used without contextualisation by Lego for commercial purposes?

• • singing birds :
    • Thing 000782 - Bruits de la Nature n.2
    • Is a bird song a work of art ?

Wiki

A wiki is a web publication using hypertext links and edited collectively by a community.
The most well-known wiki is Wikipedia, but there are a lot more.
A wiki website is powered by a wiki software.