'Mediation on X', by Brandon LaBelle

Mediation on X
Brandon LaBelle

In the heart of the city lies a square. Four streets branch out, one hits a dead end. For decades, a massive wooden gate has kept people wondering: what lies behind?

The closed access to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp—a public gateway long appropriated by a former director as a private garage—serves as a metaphor for the inside-out logic of institutions. Limiting access to the very life they claim to serve, the institutional illusion of being synonymous with their societal ambitions is steadily dissolving. Worse still, many institutions have become ouroboric: they have morphed into the very problems they were meant to address — a cycle propelling these spiraling times.

More than half a century ago, Ivan Illich already warned of this institutional trap, claiming we are ‘… schooled to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence’, expanding into a state where our ‘imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value'.

Opening this gate, we started the formation of an ‘extitution’ through a reverse praxis: thinking from the outside-in. Infiltrating with his Pirate Pedagogy, Brandon LaBelle marked this interstitial space— between in and out, institution and outside world, building and dwelling—with an opening ritual for this ‘extitution’: a ‘Meditation on X’.

Introduction
By Jan Denoo, Nico Dockx

Meditation on X (and the self-built)
By Brandon LaBelle

Pirate Pedagogy
By Brandon LaBelle

Afterthought: Cosmopoetic technique
By Brandon LaBelle

Meditation on X was released on the occasion of the official opening of a series of artistic protocols proposed by invited artists – BLESS, Brandon LaBelle, Emilia Schupp and Rirkrit Tiravanija – for the forthcoming Studio Stadswaag space at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp end 2028, initiated by Expanding Academy and Stadsform, 14-15/05/2026, and with the support of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, University of Antwerp, Endeavour, District Antwerpen and Vlaamse Overheid (in the frame of the Stimuleringsinstrument Kunst in Opdracht in de Publieke Ruimte).

Published within the context of the Expanding Academy Publication Series edited by Nico Dockx and Judith Wielander at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.
2026