The audacity to listen
In the year of its 35th anniversary, argos underwent major organisational changes. Navigating the ever-evolving institutional realities of the Belgian cultural field, the Brussels’ centre for audiovisual arts seized the departure of its previous director as an opportunity for introspection. With resilience deeply rooted in the organisation's past, we decided to launch a process of transformation and restoration.
Since such an organisational transition is also relevant to the ecosystem in which the organisation operates, we chose to let the issues of this internal trajectory trickle down into our programming and presentation activities. To actively engage in knowledge sharing, we wanted to concretely address the complementarities and synergies of our activities and hold space for the wider field of Belgian-based audiovisual arts. That is why the Tabula Rasa research programme was dedicated to self-reflection, both as an exercise in institutional transparency and as a way to safeguard our capacity to respond to what is happening in the city and in the world.
Between October and December 2024, audiences and partners were invited to participate in various exchanges organised around three main axes: collaborative cultural work, archival practices, and community-building. These topics were addressed in various ways throughout the programme: thematic roundtable discussions (‘open forums’), film programmes featuring films from the argos collection, a performance and an audiovisual installation (L'Autre Bureau des Pleurs) by artist Carla Adra and, finally, the media arts festival div.fuse, organised in collaboration with the Flemish non-profit organisation Breedbeeld.
The audacity to listen looks back at this rich programme through the lens of seven contributors, each documenting in their own way the various critical observations that were made throughout the process. Epistolary poems and letters between cultural workers and artists bookend the publication. Two members of the interdisciplinary, anti-work arts collective Bare Minimum delve deeper into the intricacies of collaborative cultural work while Ils Huygens and Annie Abrahams contemplate both the benefits and risks of slowing down the pace. In doing so, they remind us to balance individual care with political awareness because if fallowing is allowed, wallowing should be done in mud.
The heart of this publication cradles two essays on the messiness of archives and the futures they enable. While Ernst van Alphen and Wolfram Vandenbergen debate how accessibility, categorisation and absence shape the course of the argos archive, it also briefly becomes a living, breathing entity in the hands of Leon Decock whose video essay Where we wait temporarily reshuffles the boxes and the films of our archival space.
The texts are interspersed with video stills of L’Autre Bureau des Pleurs, the commissioned work of Carla Adra for which she invited Belgian-based cultural workers to share stories of professional experiences. This collection of anonymous testimonies draws a clear picture of the cultural sector in Belgium – its frustrations, complexities, strengths and vulnerabilities. With The Spare Column, Paula Rodríguez Sardiñas voices her own experience of abuse in the sector, adding another worker’s lament to Adra’s choir of sorrow (‘pleurs’ means cry, tears or lament,‘bureau’ means office). Serine ahefa, on her end, insists on the need for trust as a transformative force, capable of reshaping relationships, by revisiting Kreyolization II - Hacking the White Cube, a video essay made in 2020-2021 based on research conducted by podiumkunsten.be and SPRKR (Spreekuur) which advises and supports artists, organisations, and groups presently disadvantaged within the subsidised arts sector.
Many questions were raised during the programme, by our audiences, by the guest speakers at discursive events and by ourselves throughout the year. Some of these questions have been included in this publication. Many remain unanswered while others are addressed over and over again, keeping the critical conversations flowing. And this is precisely what the authors of this publication have in common: they refuse to stop questioning the habits and infrastructures of the Belgian cultural sector and especially their political ramifications.
Our media library, which reopened at the end of 2023, has been a continuous source of inspiration throughout this journey, as the last chapter attests. It is in that same spirit that this publication has been created: it aims to serve as a building block for other organisations, groups or collectives, who wish to engage in a similar exercise of institutional self-reflection.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to everyone who took part in this collective experience, to those who dared to speak up and to those who listened.
the ₐᵣᶢᴼˢ team
