This is a story connecting Los Angeles, Berlin and Brussels… I met Fred Dewey in Brussels when he was invited for a residency at Superdeals in 2018 and organised several reading sessions around Hannah Arendt. As a philosopher and scholar he assembled with artists and scholars to set up reading groups in different parts of the world. My conversations and meetings with Fred started with the artistic collective of Ecole Mondiale and our dialogue became much more intensive between 2018 and 2019. We began to meet regularly in the same bar in Brussels to discuss my struggles as an artist with an institution concerning my rejected PhD in the Arts. Fred was intrigued by the first Almanac of Fair Practices and our conversations took a whole direction into conflict and dealing with it on a personal level.
Summer 2023 artists Filip van Dingenen and Hélène Meyer re-installed part of Dewey’s extensive library. They are opening up his collection of books to artists and researchers from their studio home. One way to activate this library is Jubilee’s 2024 Reading Room program. This program performs a collective knowledge transfer – using the library as a situated research tool from which each Jubilee artist can select a title and propose it for a collective reading and discussion session.
In collaboration with Beyond Baroque, the Fred Rogers Dewey Legacy Project (FRDLP) is an international team of stakeholders who aim to preserve Fred’s legacy by promoting the efforts of this peripatetic cultural leader whose texts and political activism only recently began to gain their much deserved reception in the US and in Europe. His eagerness to identify the critical intersection between politics and culture and his willingness to demonstrate how to put these ideas into action continues to resonate with diverse audiences. Organised by artists, publishers and curators, FRDLP seeks to safeguard Fred’s intellectual estate, while supporting those across the globe who aim to enact his texts in theory and practice.