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Revisit Reuse
Wednesday, May 1, 2024, 16:00-21:00
Saturday, May 4, 2024, 11:00-18:00
Chaussee de Jette 388, 1081 Brussels
Metro station: Simonis/Elisabeth
“Revisit Reuse” was a small-scale exhibition and two-day work session that took place in Brussels, in May 2024. It brought together questions and provocations addressing universalisms in Free Culture and Open Access and built resources for collective practices of reuse. How to deal with issues of cultural appropriation, power differences and the limits of conventional citation and acknowledgement?
The space and the exhibition were designed in collaboration with artist Flo*Souad Benaddi and included a series of prompts by Erri Ammonita, Bye Bye Binary, Séverine Dusollier, Andrea Francke, Gary Hall, Jennifer Hayashida, Cathryn Klasto, Nkule Mabaso, Nicolas Malevé, Dubravka Sekulić, Winnie Soon, Christopher Ba Thi Nguyen, Marloes de Valk and Stephen Wright. We also included a collection of cases that showed the complexities of reuse, and a library of materials published under the “Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r)”, in collaboration with Constant. Flo*Souad Benaddi, Clara Bougon, Castillo, Sarah Magnan, Chae Kim, Cathryn Klasto, Gerrie van Noord, Femke Snelting, Litó Walkey and Eva Weinmayr took part in the work session.
Ecologies of Dissemination
Ecologies of Dissemination is an artistic research project on feminist decolonial methods and practices of reuse conducted by Eva Weinmayr, Femke Snelting and many collaborators – funded by the Swedish Research Council (Artistic Research Project Grant, 2021-25). The collaborative research project aims to develop a politics of re-use that acknowledges the tensions and overlaps between feminist methodologies, decolonial knowledge practices and principles of open access.
Invested in collective art and knowledge practices, we are concerned with how the current drive to openness in dissemination policies might overlook relational aspects. If we consider authorship to be part of a collective cultural effort, how can we invent a politics of sharing and re-use that does not buy into a universalist approach to openness.
Open Access policies (regional, national and international) tend not to recognize that knowledge practices are situated in contingent social and historical conditions, nor that there might be ethical reasons to refrain from release and re-use. Therefore, it seems important to develop a politics of re-use that complexifies the binary between open (Free Culture, Open Access) and closed (IP, copyright) while being attentive to power differences embedded in practices of re-use. This includes taking into account the situated conditions for production and an understanding that the defaults of openness and transparency have different consequences in different contexts.
Furthermore, Ecologies of Dissemination, in conversation with a community of practitioners and theorists aims to understand, describe and exhibit the intricacies and porosity of feminist decolonial art and knowledge practices that don’t fall back on a modernist concept of the artist as an original creator, based on individual expression. Here art-making would not be understood as an act of intentionality (self-expression) but as an act of relating.
Ecologies of Dissemination is a collaboration between HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg (SE), the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK) and Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association active in the fields of art, feminism, media and technology in Brussels (BE).
→ See the research end report that we will upload shortly.
PARSE Journal (issue #21)
As part of the project we shared the range of experimental, practice-based and collective research methods and activities that extended our understandings and practices of decolonial feminist sharing and reuse. in issue 21, summer 2025 in PARSE Journal (Platform for Artistic Research). In this PARSE Journal issue we share these methods, the materials produced as well as sample documents and a range of questions that may be helpful for readers engaging in collective practices, alongside a set of texts and podcasts for those wanting to dive deeper.
→ Visit Ecologies of Dissemination, issue #21, PARSE Journal.
CC2r
“Collective Commitment to Reuse (CC2r)” makes a shift from condition to commitment, which was proposed during the work session “Revisit Reuse” as an attempt to call for a commitment to practising in solidarity rather than relying on legal frameworks such as licences. This shift from conditions to commitment meant that we reformulated CC4r from a legal tool, with all its promises and problems, into a process, as “a ground from where to commit to” as Castillo, one of the participants in the session, formulated it.
