Reading Room ♯50 Louise de Bethune & Julie Van Elslande (Eavatea)

Practicalities:

When? 2026-05-29, from 18:00 to 20:00.
Where? Agency.

---

Short summary: Louise de Bethune and Julie Van Elslande will share insights from their ongoing research at the Praticotheque Drawing a framework for Eavatea.

---

Description:

" For this twelfth session, Agency and Jubilee invite Julie Van Elslande and Louise de Bethune. From their ongoing research at Agency’s Praticotheque, ‘Drawing a Framework for Eavatea, addressing legal questions on Eavatea in conversation with Agency’s ‘list of boundary things’’, they propose a reading starting from Law, art and the Commons (2017) by Merima Bruncevic. In this book, Bruncevic takes up the cultural commons not merely as an abstract notion, but as a lawscape, an in-between-space of entangled hyperobjects (artworks):

“The mural, even though it appears as physical and private in nature, when understood as a hyperobject, the assumption that a physical (private) good can strictly speaking only ever be in one place at a time is nuanced. Seen as a hyperobject that is constantly entangled with other hyperobjects it instantly creates the in-between-space that acts as a commons.” We chose this book as a starting point to explore how the notion of lawscape opens possibilities for the creative potential of law to unfold and how it can accompany attempts to challenge traditional dichotomies between owners and consumers of culture.

After an intense dialogue with the List of things of Agency last year, distilling recurring, open-ended notions used in jurisprudence about IP and collective work as possible building blocks for a new framework, Julie and Louise currently continue their research in dialogue with Agency’s library. "

---

Guest(s): Julie Van Elslande, Louise de Bethune

---

Library document(s) selected: Law, art and the Commons

---

Links:

• https://www.jubilee-art.org/news/reading-room-50-agency-lawscape