Revisit Reuse
Revisit Reuse Work Session
“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.
Invitation
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 exhibits questions and provocations that address universalisms in Free Culture and Open Access. How to deal with issues of cultural appropriation, power differences and the limits of conventional citation and acknowledgment? This work builds resources for collective practices of reuse.
The space and the exhibition are designed in collaboration with artist Flo*Souad Benaddi and includes 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. You will also find a collection of cases that show the complexities of reuse, and a library of materials published under the Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r), in collaboration with Constant.
Revisitors: Flo*Souad Benaddi, Clara Bougon, Castillo, Sarah Magnan, Chae Kim, Cathryn Klasto, Gerrie van Noord, Femke Snelting, Litó Walkey, Eva Weinmayr.
Revisit Reuse is developed by Femke Snelting and Eva Weinmayr as part of the artistic research project Ecologies of Dissemination in collaboration with PARSE (Platform for Artistic Research Sweden).
Join Eva and Femke for a guided tour on Wednesday, May 1 at 17.00
The space is on the ground floor. Please get in touch whether we can help with any access needs you might have.
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Work Session Images
Reuse Prompts exhibited in the space
For the event we commissioned a series of prompts from a range of practitioners and scholars invested in practices of reuse to support the participants of “Revisit Reuse” work session to draw on different entry points, addressing gaps, concerns and contradictions. They point towards potential gaps in the ways we practice reuse and purposefully trigger the reader to consider a specific angle. Installed in the space, the prompts took many forms or shapes — from questions to games, from scores to mixtapes, drawings, diagrams, collages and letters.
Prompt 01: CUTE - donations
Prompt 02: CUTE - packets
Prompt 03: Do first times exist?
Prompt 04: Collective agreements
Prompt 05: Different assessment
Prompt 06: Intimacy vs Property
Prompt 07: CC4r case studies
Prompt 08: Never yours to begin with
Prompt 09: Rebeing
Prompt 10: This Is Not A Prompt
Prompt 11: Fortune teller
Prompt 12: Sitting on reuse
Prompt 13: CUTE - examples
Prompt 14: Prepositions
Prompt 15: At the start of a process rather than at the end
Prompt 16: What should a licence be about?
Prompt 17: re:re:re:er:ri mixtape
Prompt 18: Certified bricks
Prompt 19: Space for discomfort
Reuse Cases
The cases describe situations in which conflicts or dissensus arise around sharing and reuse in collective practices. We have drawn them from our own experiences and contexts; some were told to us by friends and colleagues and others we have retold from public accounts. The cases help to bring some nuance to the binary of “universal entitlement”, referring to a carte blanche permission to appropriate freely, and “universal restrictiveness”, a concept that claims that cultural appropriation is impermissible. (See prompt Real Life Example). We wrote the cases as short vignettes, on purpose omitting names, institutions or places. Their specificity is without detail to allow them to trigger actions, reflections and changes of perspective in different contexts. As a collection, they function as a toolbox with combinatory building blocks that we hope can contribute to the construction of more complex accounts of reuse.
Reuse Case: Cultural Appropriation
Reuse Case: Conceptual Poetry
Reuse Case: Entangled Authorship
Reuse Case: Non-Promiscuous Sharing
Reuse Case: Unsolicited Collaboration
Reuse Case: Declining Responsibility
Reuse Case: Wearing au dai
Reuse Case: Kimono runway
Reuse Case: Whose authority
Reuse Case: Shallow appropriation
Reuse Case: Balancing concerns
Reuse Case: Folktales
Reuse Case: Teaching Assignments
Reuse Case: Restitution
CC4r in use
“Collective Conditions for Reuse” (CC4r) is a collectively written document that can be included in any publication as a way of reorienting conventional copyright. It is based on the Free Art Licence (FAL) but reformulates the position of the author as an individual to recognise that authorship is “situated in social and historical conditions and that there may be reasons to refrain from release and re-use”. In an important deviation from FAL and other Free Culture licences, it asks reusers to “take into account that the defaults of openness and transparency have different consequences in different contexts” and introduces the possibility of not-sharing. For the working session we started compiling a list of publications working with cc4r.
→ See list of publications using CC4r
→ See CC4r
Conversation transcripts
Conversation with Séverine Dusollier
Resources
Reading Group, Limits to Openness
References
Conditions, manifestos, principles
