JUBILEE; Caveat

Jubilee is a platform for artistic research and production that offers continuous support for the work of six artists, while hosting other art workers on a project base instigated by the platform's collective research. Jubilee focuses on the production of the work of the member artists: Justin Bennett, Eleni Kamma, Vincent Meessen, Jasper Rigole, and the duo Vermeir & Heiremans. Their shared interests lead to research projects on the conditions of artistic practice, Jubilee's second focus, involving a wide variety of collaborations.

For the Jubilee artists, collectivizing and sharing partnerships has been an opportunity to use the benefits of networks, visibility and other resources, while alleviating the responsibilities of fundraising, bookkeeping and legal costs. But Jubilee remains in the first place a platform for content exchange and discussion. Together, the artists constitute Jubilee’s collective artistic direction.

In that sense Jubilee has used its own networked structure to model Caveat, the current research project on the ecology of artistic practices. Organising collaboration, consultation and exchange between artists, different actors from the visual art field and actors from a wider social context has established a broad network that offers the research project a view on the (Belgian and internatioal) art world in such a way that it can be understood as an ecology – approaching different perspectives as equally important. In collaboration with a number of research partners, Jubilee developed Caveat as an interface that inserts itself within the fields of friction between these different actors which allows for moving discussions and negotiations from a private, secretive environment – where considerable differences in economic power positions exist unchallenged – to the agonistic inclusivity which Caveat strives for, as a project situated in the public domain.