On a mild autumn day in October 2020, the team behind On & For at Auguste Orts in Brussels meet up for a conversation led by curator and film programmer Helena Kritis. Around the table sit the 4 founding artists-Herman Asselberghs, Sven Augustijnen, Manon de Boer and Anouk De Clercq-the director, Marie Logie, the financial director, Pepa De Maesschalck, and the coordinator of On & For, Rebecca Jane Arthur. After years of working together, a relaxed sense of familiarity fills the room. Yet Kritis tries to provoke new thought with her line of questioning. She asks them to reflect on their practice, as a platform, to provide insights into the workings of On & For, and probes for their ambitions for the future of On & For as the project (2018-2021) begins to draw to a close, once more, again 'for now'. The conversation that takes place is held in Dutch, recorded, and later transcribed and translated into English. The material is edited by Arthur as a simulation of the sprawling conversation had during that afternoon together at Auguste Orts. Below the voices of Auguste Orts appear alongside one another, unnamed, without hierarchies, as an accumulation of the voices and thoughts behind the happenings of the platform.

I have written a lot about On & For Production (later, Production and Distribution). However, a comparatively small part of that writing made it into publications. Most of it was produced for applications or within the daily working routine. In setting up frameworks that are outside of anticipated moulds and which don’t reproduce the usual roles, expectations and formats, one ends up spending an incredible amount of time describing what the initiative is, or is not. As exhausting and repetitive as this writing might be, it was absolutely needed to bring the project forward and to make methods that operate between established schemes intelligible. Having said that, the only way in which I can write about On & For yet again, and if this text is to permeate any gearing libido, it is by deliberately departing from the descriptive kind of writing that would aim again at drawing the singularity of what we have been doing. I would like to write instead about how I think about On & For now, or more precisely, about why I find myself going back to that experience now—after years and during the pandemic—in relation to a series of more general concerns. And still, if I took a few lines to mention what I would not write—the administrative, nerdy, sector-oriented, functional text—it is because this kind of almost-disembodied type of writing is part of a back-office, unsexy invisible labour that I believe is a real catalyst for change, and more so now. It is a form of maintenance that is as looked down on as it is becoming increasingly crucial.

"The research enacted by LIMA, generously supported by the conversations it held with artists and its distribution organisation sisters, has brought forward a number of interesting approaches to distribution practices that LIMA has been internally exploring. In addition to the impact that the ideas generated have had for LIMA’s own internal self-exploration, we hope they are useful as a space of imagining for other distributors."

'I am aware that the phrase ‘artists’ moving image’ is at odds with my proposition that points at the potentials stemming from this type of production and this is why—at least temporarily—I am so eager to accept the code name ‘AMI’, because as an abbreviation, of course only on a surface level, it loses constant emphasis on the professional definitions of the term ‘artist’, especially as embedded in the economy of prestige...'

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We were invited by On & For Production and Distribution to produce a creative report on the new Dummies workshop series. As artist and curator, peers and dummies before anything else, we were both present when it was launched in 2019, in Brussels, with a roundtable on artists' moving image (AMI) distribution that focused particularly on the Belgian context. One year later, in 2020, we participated in a virtual Dummies workshop on AMI production. When signing up for these workshops, one is asked to submit two questions that will be addressed to the panel of experts. The accumulation of these questions, of this matter, has become our focal point for this report. While a good number of the questions posed by the Dummies workshop participants were discussed and debated during the public moments, some of them were left suspended and have remained present ever since. We invite you to ponder the questions, both lost and found, in our text and image contribution to this publication.

'On the journey of producing films, we—artists and filmmakers—do not travel alone. To strive for fair pay for artistic labour, we need to involve ourselves in building and maintaining fair practices. And the producer, our travelling companion, extends a welcoming hand.'

Recently a colleague asked for permission to sleep in the next day and consequently show up late for work. After carefully considering her request, I realised I couldn’t find a good reason to not accommodate her appeal. After all, we all need sleep.

A crack. ‘A line on the surface of something along which it has split without breaking apart’, says the dictionary. ‘Something you can sneak through’, says Mike Sperlinger.

In the early days of cinema, Dziga Vertov and Alexandr Medvedkin embarked on the Agit-train which was equipped with on-board editing studios and a movie theatre. Riding in the early twenties through the remote lands of Russia, they filmed, edited and screened their films to people in the villages they passed. They wanted to democratise the accessibility of cinema with the adage: ‘If the people cannot come to the cinema, the cinema will come to the people.’