Level Five

Description

Level Five is a cooperative studio community for and by artists. We collectively organise and take care of our spaces and the people making use of them. In this way, we create a durable foundation for each of our artistic practices and initiatives. Established by artists in 2019, Level Five currently runs three studio buildings across three Brussels municipalities, providing artist studios for more than a hundred members.

Through cooperation, Level Five rethinks the organisational and economic structures of the arts, redefines what it means to be an artist, and rehearses potential fair practices that could take root in the locality we live and work in. As such, our community develops an understanding of what it stands for and how we see ourselves, which prepares us for solidarity and coalitions with others in different situations but similar struggles. In this way, collectively organising as artists is repoliticising being an artist. Level Five can be seen as a search for an alternative; a prefigurative practice, not a utopia — a continuous process of readjusting and working through difficulties to come to a new world in the shell of the old.