question: Whose collection?
chapter: emptor

In this Assembly of Practice, we examine collections as potential places of shared interest, zooming in on questions that come to the surface with the complexity of collecting contemporary art practices, increasingly immaterial, performative, situated, ongoing and collaborative in nature.

Their integration in collections by means of documentation, reactivation protocols and complex contractual relationships may satisfy desires of collection(er)s but don't seem to create change in terms of care attributed to the needs of a practice, its ecology and sustainability.

Conservation and reactivation often stay disconnected from the driving forces, methodologies and contexts of the collected material elements, thus allowing the pieces nothing more than exposure in a curated frame.

During a day of closed collective reflection we will go into different practices researching and/or implementing strategies to own, activate and conserve differently.

The group opens up to the public at 17h with the intention to share concerns, questions, insights and ideas collected.

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participants - draft day program: 10h - 10h20 : arrivals and intro

10h20 - 11h20: presentation + discussion
*Teresa Calonje (researcher goldsmiths - appropriating the moment https://www.gold.ac.uk/art/research/current-mphil--phd-research/calonje-teresa/) 
" I will move from the legal to more existential questions claiming an impossibility of appropriation and of remaining in the place/the moment (through Heidegger and Agamben). I will investigate notions of not-owning and poverty and will look at ideas of non-collection and even non-performance (F. Moten), through the work of artist Luisa Nobrega among others."

11h20 - 12h15: intro + colective reading + discussion
*AGENCY 
(tbc which form this takes)
intro by Raphaël (as member of the board of AGENCY)?
collective reading of case from the list of things
to be discussed further with kobe

12h15 - 13h presentation + discussion
 *Jennifer Beauloye (KANAL https://kanal.brussels/nl/collectie)
 strategies of working with foreign collections + creation/activation of new collection with specific attention for the BXL ecology of the arts

lunch

14h - 15h: presentation + discussion
*Raphaël Pirenne 
on his work on different archives from the point of view of re-activation rather than conservation (galerie ERG/...)
+ policy work on the idea of a platform for support of archives in French community
how to create living traces?

 15h - 16h: presentation + discussion
*Heide Hinrichs (On some birds of epal/Second Shelf/Silent Sisters / Stille Schwestern Theresa Hak Kyung Cha...) 
'collaborative strategies for re-composing collections' / who can contribute/activate? 
"As I thought about how and what to do for an exhibition in a country I have never been to and have yet to make a connection with, the relationship between the locals and Hodgson’s outsider status was a way for me to begin. I cannot assume what this gesture of bringing the drawings back to Kathmandu, a historic exchange, will mean from a local perspective, but that is something I want to figure out, in creating a space for encounter, an in-between space of communication."

public moment: living traces taking care of the collection under discussion possibly conversation/screening Eline Declercq, Gesamthof reactivation of 'curating is writing the future' from Stijn Van Dorpe - re-negotiation/annex to contract with collector/guardian?