Founded by artist Kobe Matthys in 1992, Agency is compiling a growing list of ‘things’ that resist easy categorization between culture and nature, between man-made creations and facts, between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, individuals and collectives. Most of these controversies are derived from legal disputes over intellectual property.

Agency calls things forth from it’s list via varying assemblies inside exhibitions, performances, publications, etc… Each assembly speculates topologically on a different question of the performative consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property for an ecology of art practices and paying attention to other types of agencies.

agency will select a number of ‘things’ speculating on the question “what if common things become included within art practices?” it will focus on things that are considered common because they are part of folklore and traditional knowledges. folklore is often described as being common, undefined, anonymous, untitled, unregistered, etc... the intellectual property requirements of origin, identification, fixation, etc... are often incompatible with folklore. folklore is considered to be "common" and to reside inside “the public domain”. but folk artists are often guardians, holders, keepers or stewards of traditional knowledges. their different belongings involve different obligations and commitments, which are attachments they are often not able to reformulate at their own will. agency pays attention to the operative consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property for the diversity of ecologies of art practices.

Marthe is an activist and performer who creates interfaces, devices & protocols to instigate our urban and institutional hardware. She engages in the administrative, cultural, political dimension of personal and collective identities. By triggering intersubjective alliances she confronts the 'self & other' to the commons, co-authorship and the redistribution into the public domain.

Marthe graduated Political and Social Sciences at the University of Antwerp (1998) and Graphic Design (2002) in St-Lukas. She was a researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht in 2005, a UNIDEE resident in 2007 and has been a guest lecturer at St-Lukas in Antwerp, the Royal Academy of Ghent and the Higher Institute of Fine Art.

Radio Ramona Marthe will use her streaming radio Ramona to capture interview, texture and daily life on board and on land.

Alfonso devises situations and artefacts that are born to be consumed becoming experiences that seek to change in some way the perception of reality, interfere in it or simply imagine it. His work only exists on a symbiotic level, intrinsically connected to man, an organic work that only comes to life through him and disappears with him. It is consumed with the experience, which at times dilates the work and expands it through oral transmission, the source of human growth, the communication of stories and memory.

Alfonso will work with the inconsistency of memory on the boat. He will consider the boat as a lucid camera, a vessel of experiences where to imprint the ecology of living system. He aims to generate a latent image of the journey by means of using canaries/octopus in the boat. One ecosystem will record the other one. The brain of this living technology will transform into electrical and chemical stimulus of the experience. The organ will become a container of this stimulus storing what science call memory. At the end of the journey the animals will have to be frozen cryogenically and sent to the Biological Centre in Barcelona. Once at the centre a group of neurologists working at the B.R.A.I.N. project will read the memories of this brain and translate into a report.

Audrey Snyder is an artist, chef, and a collaborator with Futurefarmers since 2007. Her work investigates the intersection of food systems and cultural production, where examination of simple practice cultivates complex thinking. She has toured the United States by bicycle, was a chef aboard Station to Station train journey, a resident artist on the remote Rabbit Island, and is the creator of Waterline Ceramics. Audrey hails from San Francisco, California and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

Audrey will be the on-board chef and will provision the vessel throughout its course — linking the movement of food, goods, and ideas by land and sea.

Anna writes from where she is, which is usually somewhere she used to be or would like to be. "To write in the midst of the present feels like an impossible but interesting goal," she once told me. "I," she admitted, "have no idea what the present is," except it was clear to me when I interviewed her, that the present exists, like our love.

Anna will write postcards destined for Seed Journey stopping points. Wanting to provide a record of the ground for those on board, she will seek news stories, personal accounts, art exhibits--anything to write off of and relay--that might aid in the production of a welcome interruption to being at sea.