Science Bar Brussels is a monthly after-work science café. This collaboration between VUB, Erasmushogeschool Brussel and deBuren offers the opportunity to experience science during dinner and drinks. Every month Science Bar Brussels presents you a hot topic from an academic point of view. The moderator searches for questions and answers from experts and the audience, to make sure you can learn and form an opinion at the same time.

Science Bar Brussels: to laugh or to cry? Are there still boundaries when it comes to reality-tv? in: Debates

Science Bar Brussels is a monthly after-work science café. This collaboration between VUB, Erasmushogeschool Brussel and deBuren offers the opportunity to experience science during dinner and drinks. Every month Science Bar Brussels presents you a hot topic from an academic point of view. The moderator searches for questions and answers from experts and the audience, to make sure you can learn and form an opinion at the same time.

Science Bar Brussels: is your hearing ok? To make your own decisions about your ears & decibels in: Debates

Organization: deBuren and the Beursschouwburg

Crowdfunding: admission of weakness or magic word? in: Debates

Organization: deBuren and the Beursschouwburg

How much politics can art endure? in: Debates

Organization: deBuren, De Brakke Grond, De Theatermaker, CPNB and NS Hispeed (www.nshispeed.nl)

From A to A in: The books

Organization: Het zoekend hert and deBuren

Eros and the human vulnerability #1 - Hubert Dethier in: Lectures

Organization: De Bezige Bij Antwerp and deBuren in collaboration with Villanella

Book presentation: Het licht (Jeroen van Rooij) in: The books

Organization: Vrijstaat O. and deBuren

Salon | 'Vroeger is een ander land'; kids trapped between borders in: Encounters

Organization: deBuren, Fonds Pascal Decroos, Mediakritiek.be and VVOJ in collaboration with Vooruit

Mediacafé #9: You don't make up the news in: Debates

During Mind the Book deBuren organizes a mediacafé with Xandra Schutte, editor in chief at De Groene Amsterdammer

DWARS! Documentary about De Groene Amsterdammer in: Encounters

Organization: Cinema Zuid in collaboration with deBuren

IDFA on Tour: Cinema Zuid in: Film

Organization: Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Cinema Zuid and deBuren

Enjoy your meal: human flesh! in: Encounters

Organization: deBuren in collaboration with HETPALEIS and in the framework of The Elephant's Journey

Who was José Saramago? in: Lectures

Organization: deBuren, Lectoraat Kunst en Economie HKU, Departement Management at the University of Amsterdam and De Brakke Grond

Culture: (not) the icing on the cake? in: Debates

Organization: deBuren, FWO, Eos and the Handelsbeurs

'Grijze Cellen': Are we our Brain? in: Debates

Organization: deBuren, the Nederlandse Taalunie and the University of Antwerp

And the award goes to? in: The books

Organization: deBuren and Vrijstaat O. in collaboration with Publisher Het Balanseer

Love between the lines in: The books

Organization: deBuren and MANA in collaboration with Daarkom

Egyptian democracy: reality or fiction? in: Debates

Organization: deBuren and the Flemish Parliament

The 'Literaire Loketten' | Chanson. Een gezongen geschiedenis van Frankrijk | Bart Van Loo in: The books

Organization: deBuren in collaboration with the Beursschouwburg

It's the economy stupid! #3: Arnold Heertje in: Debates

Finissage: Thursday 29 March 2012 | 18:00-21:00 hrs
Closing event on Goethe's Faust (Part II)

In Part II of Faust (1832) Goethe confronts the promises and pitfalls of the Industrial Revolution and the economic growth it generated. As Minister of Finance at the Court of Weimar he was well positioned to comment on these developments. His insights have kept their relevance until today. In Part II Goethe presents Faust himself as a project developer, who not only introduces paper money to the Sovereign's Court, but who, in his blind urge to realise his economic project of unlimited growth, can also be held responsible for the violent deaths of Philemon and Baucis, the elderly traditional couple that would not step aside for his ambitions. Success and calamity come about through the cunning mediation of Mephistopheles, who obviously follows his own agenda. The main point of reference for this lecture will be H.C. Binswanger's analysis of Goethe's Faust, which he shows is a thoroughly alchemical play, a critique of alchemy's ‘Faustian' attempt to overcome transitoriness (to find the liquid gold elixir of life). That attempt to conquer time is carried out in different ways in the modern world by science, art, and the economy. The play offers a dramatic representation and critique of each of the three paths. Binswanger emphasises economics because in the modern world it totally dominates both art and science. The act of creation by the economy is phantasmagoric, it unleashes a huge fascination for the infinitely augmentable, that is, for eternal progress. The economy thus gains the transcendental character (i.e., surpassing all limits) which man formerly sought in religion. It is not belief in a hereafter, but economic activity in the here and now that opens up modern man's perspective on eternity. Like Faust, modern man has become blind to the problem of limits - and therefore easy prey to the economic alchemists who promise indefinite growth by turning base metals into gold, transitoriness into permanence, and swamps into farmland. After all, Mephistopheles, who is "the spirit, that evermore denies", is Faust's business partner!Whilst we ponder whether the new riches that we have amassed are real or illusory, it is worth taking a closer look at how Goethe dramatises this issue.

Finissage: The Residence (reading room) in: Lectures

Saturday 24 March 2012 | 18:00-21:00 hrs
Christine Gerrard (UK): Representing the Bubble, lecture
John McTague (UK): The South-Sea Bubble in the Press, lecture

Christine Gerrard
Christine Gerrard is currently working on the emergence of the novel, linking its origins to questions of value and material insubstantiality that are central to early 18th century discourse. The financial revolution of that era led to new forms of ‘virtual' property, something that was intensely debated by writers such as Defoe, Swift, Pope and Gay who were at the same time reflecting upon their new positions as producers of fiction. For the reading room Christine Gerrard will address the South Sea Bubble of 1720, an economic Ponzi scheme that bears an uncanny resemblance to today's economic crisis and its public debate (or lack of it). The bursting of the 18th century bubble signalled a crisis of representation that was maybe even more intrusive than ours. That is if we assume that we are armed to deal with the rhetoric of marketing, finance and politics in a way that our 18th century ancestors still had to learn. Yet there are parallels in time to be drawn from the ‘crooked' language of these financial fictions, sold as securities, derivatives, options or futures. In the 18th century context, the moment when for the first time these fictional financial instruments, the new ways to wealth, lost all of their value, a shockwave was sent through society like never before, and not only in economic terms. Gerrard's reflections on this historic event will for sure cast an interesting perspective on today's crisis. Christine Gerrard is Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her publications include The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Poetry, Politics, and National Myth, 1725 1742 (1994) and, with Douglas Fairer, Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (1999). She is editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry.

John McTague
John McTague will explore the range of responses to the South-Sea Bubble in the press; in periodical journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and other ephemeral printed forms. In particular, he will address the ethical dimension of such responses, in the light of some of the moralising responses to the financial chicanery of our own times, and the influence of this moralising on ideas of political economy. To what extent was the new 18th century financial system, in which imaginary property (the everdeferred promise of the future settlement of debts) was bought and sold, held to be eroding the nation's virtues, political or otherwise? What are we to make of the fact that most of this moralising appears only after the system has failed, and failed spectacularly? How were these anxieties expressed (or countered), and to what ends? What myths and misconceptions about the process of valuation (of credit, of land, of people, of ideas) shored up these responses? Was news itself the cause of the crash, and should writers and gossips be held accountable for the fluctuations in credit that relied on public opinion? Was it the corruption of the South-Sea Company, or the unstable nature of credit in itself that led to such moral outrage? Or, even more simply, were people distrusting something they didn't fully understand?

Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, republished in an extensively revised and extended version a few years after the crash, contained a provocatively amoral view of market forces. It insisted that valuation of any kind was always unstable and contingent. This kind of radical relativism, which emphasised end results over the means by which they were achieved, was anathema to many writers, including Trenchard and Gordon in their periodical essays known as Cato's Letters. The ethical reactions explored here, then, are rooted in questions of meaning, and will lead on to a discussion of the crisis in representation that the South Sea Bubble provoked.

John McTague is Departmental Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at St. Peter's College, University at Oxford. His DPhil thesis, completed in 2009, was on the representation of politics in Britain from the Popish Plot to the South Sea Bubble. His general interests are in literature and politics in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, bibliography and the history of the book. There is a particular focus in his work on hoaxes, scandals, and similar episodes, such as the Bickerstaff Hoax or the Warming Pan Scandal. Particular authors like Swift, Dryden, and Defoe figure in this research, but the focus is more on popular literature, pamphlets, broadsides, and other ephemeral forms of polemic.

The Residence (reading room) #4 in: Lectures

Saturday 10 March 2012 | 18:00-21:00 hrs
Bert De Muynck: Creative Industry in China, lecture

Bert De Muynck
After a three month preliminary research project during May-July 2007 Bert De Muynck, Mónica Carriço and Ned Rossiter guest-edited Urban China #33 (called Creative China). Their issue of Urban China set out to critique and redefine the idea and practice of ‘mapping' the creative industries. De Muynck and his co-editors were mostly interested in the multiple idioms of expression that make creative industries intelligible beyond the blandness of policy discourse. In Reading Room De Muynck will give an update of his earlier research into the matter, based on his findings of the period between 2008-11, which ranged from ‘counter-mapping' the creative industries in Beijing to interviews with more than 50 Chinese designers, policy makers and academics connected to China's creative industries. With a focus on the alternative mapping of the creative industries a series of vectors of research like migrant networks and service labour, eco-politics of creative waste, informational geographies vs. creative clusters, craftsmanship, real-estate speculation and artist villages are identified as elements of a new form of creative engineering of Chinese society. Bert de Muynck is an architect, writer and co-director of MovingCities, an independent research organisation investigating the role that architecture and urbanism play in shaping the contemporary city. During the past years MovingCities has conducted research, lectures and workshops in China, Israel, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland and Indonesia.

In the past decade Bert de Muynck has lived and worked in Amsterdam (2001-2006), Beijing (2006-2009) and Shanghai (since 2009). Since September 2011 De Muynck has been Assistant Professor at the The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Architecture, and at the HKU Shanghai Study Center. De Muynck holds an MA in Architectural Engineering (Catholic University Leuven) and a diploma in Cultural Sciences (Free University Brussels). http://movingcities.org

The Residence (reading room) #3 in: Encounters

Saturday 25 February 2012 | 618:00-21:00 hrs
Daniel McClean: A wager for the afterlife - a lawful experiment, lecture
Robrecht Vanderbeeken: Drunk on Capitalism, book presentation

Daniel McClean
Daniel McClean specialises in art, media and intellectual property law. He works on the links between conceptual art and the law in terms of immateriality, performance and action. In each case, the contract becomes both the mechanism and the document for recording processes of negotiation and exchange. It excavates relationships, and becomes a diagrammatic structure in a way that is real and binding. McClean states that artists appropriate the performativity of the law, but don't necessarily rely on its architecture to get there. Filling the gap that emerges between the two, he defines his role as a designer of situations that test relations, and as a mediator of the resulting interaction - even when he's not dealing with law-based projects. The second part of Goethe's Faust was an important inspiration for The Residence project. In reference to the document signed by Faust and Mephistopheles, which was not a contract of service but a wager, Daniel McClean will pursue a hypothetical ‘wager' for Reading Room. The outcome of a wager is not fixed, and has no set time limit. It is actually a bet on what will happen in the future. In part, the formulation of such a proposition, implies a fictionalisation of McClean's law practice, yet, as with any contract, the wager also becomes a fascinating site of reflection.

Daniel McClean is an independent curator, writer, and art-legal adviser. McClean was formerly a solicitor at Withers LLP (London and New York) where he specialised in art, media and intellectual property law. In this capacity, he has advised a wide range of public and private art world clients, including the Arts Council of England, Gagosian Gallery, Haunch of Venison, and The Tate. McClean writes regularly on art-legal matters. He was the commissioning editor of The Trials of Art (2007), an anthology that looks at issues such as obscenity, religious sensitivity, aesthetic value, appropriation, and artistic freedom within the context of celebrated legal cases where an artwork has been challenged. McClean holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford and an LLM in IP Law from the University of London.

Robrecht Vanderbeeken
Robrecht Vanderbeeken recently co-edited an interdisciplinary collection of essays. Drunk on Capitalism probes the impact of the market economy on art and science in the post-Cold War era. For Reading Room he will elaborate on the multifaceted and ambiguous relationship between art and capital. Contemporary art claims to be autonomous, but art costs money and artists cannot survive on their love for art alone. Vanderveeken questions how artists respond to the rise of economic strictures in modern culture in general and the art market in particular. He analyses the impact on the critical potential of art when works of art become investments, and will reflect on the artist's schizophrenic position in a global, late-capitalist society. Robrecht Vanderbeeken received his PhD in philosophy of science at Ghent University in 2003. Afterwards he became a researcher at the theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. During this two-year project he worked on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Zizek. From 2005 until 2007 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the philosophy department of Ghent University working on topics in analytical metaphysics and techno-science critique. Since 2007 Vanderbeeken has been Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Fine Arts (KASK) at University College Ghent. His current areas of research are the philosophical implications of media art and the interpretation of video art.

The Residence (reading room) #2 in: Encounters

Saturday 18 February 2012 | 18:00-21:00 hrs
Luis Jacob: Commerce by Artists, book presentation
Julia Bryan-Wilson: lecture

Luis Jacob
Artist, writer and curator Luis Jacob (previously at Extra City as artist within the Animism project) will speak about Commerce by artists, a book he edited for Art Metropole in Toronto. Commerce by Artists documents a fascinating range of artists' projects produced since the 1950s by international artists who have sought to engage, rather than merely represent, the commercial world of which they are a part. This anthology encompasses canonical works such as Yves Klein's Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1958), Seth Siegelaub's Artist's Contract (1971), and Lee Lozano's Strike Piece (1969), as well as innovative and rarely-documented works like Keith Obadike's Blackness for Sale (2001), Kelly Mark's In & Out (1997, ongoing until 2032), and Ben Kinmont's Sometimes a Nicer Sculpture Is to Be Able to Provide a Living for Your Family (1998, ongoing). Luis Jacob's diverse practice has addressed issues of social interaction and the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. Working in video, installation, sculpture and photography, as well as actions in the public sphere, his work invites a collision of meaning systems that destabilise our conventions of viewing and open up possibilities for participation and the creation of knowledge. His work has been exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach), the Hamburger Kunstverein, documenta12, and at the Animism exhibition that toured the Generali Foundation (Vienna), Kunsthalle Bern and Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen. He recently showed a collaborative work (with Noam Gonick) at Contour 2011: 5th Biennial of Moving Image (Mechelen), and presently has a major solo exhibition A finger in the pie, A foot in the door, A leg in quicksand at the Kunsthalle Lingen.

Julia Bryan-Wilson
In her most recent book, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009), Bryan-Wilson explores the politicisation of artistic labour in the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s within the Art Workers' Coalition and the New York Art Strike. In it she refers to Carole Pateman's definition of work, by which "we do not just mean the activity that provides for most people the major determinant of their status in the world, or the occupation that the individual follows full time and that provides him with his livelihood, but (...) refer also to activities that are carried on in co-operation with others, that are ‘public' and intimately related to the wider society and its (economic) needs; thus we refer to activities that, potentially, involve the individual in decisions about collective affairs, the affairs of the enterprise and of the community, in a way that leisure-time activities usually do not." For Reading Room Julia Bryan-Wilson will speak about ideas of precarity, temporality, and the problem of imagining alternatives to work within late capitalism. Her presentation will invite discussion on how art, as an object and a system of signification, circulates as both commodity and sign from a feminist perspective and pose the question: what kind of mode of production does art making involve? Julia Bryan-Wilson is an author, scholar, and educator whose research includes feminist and queer theory, craft histories, performance, video art, artistic activism, and coalitional politics. She has received fellowships from the Henry Moore Institute, the Smithsonian Institute, the Getty Research Institute, and a joint award from Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Bryan-Wilson taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of California, Irvine, before joining the University of California, Berkeley in Autumn 2011.

The Residence (reading room) #1 in: Encounters

Organization: deBuren in collaboration with the Vlaams Architectuur Instituut and deSingel

China's new megacities in: Encounters

The 'Literaire Loketten': Honderveertig kilo liefde (140 kilos love) in: The books

Organization: deBuren in collaboration with the Beursschouwburg

'Trekhaak gezocht': a theatrical road movie in: Film

Organization: deBuren in collaboration with the Beursschouwburg

It's the economy, stupid #4: Mariana Mazzucato in: Lectures

Philippe Van Parijs: Linguistic justice for Europe & for the World in: Lectures