The Convention on the Use of Space was drafted between March and May 2015 at Casco, a non-profit art center in Utrecht. The text is a “legal instrument to support the use value of housing and occupied space over vacancy and speculation,” developed during a series of workshops led by artist Adelita Husni-Bey alongside lawyers, squatters, undocumented people and their advocates, academics, activists, and the general public. The document now lives on a website, as a PDF, and large-format poster.

The convention is a para-legal document, meaning that it borrows legal language and outlines a set of standards agreed to by its signers, but the claims it makes are not legal. Although it is not legally binding, the document is legitimized by its signatories, which include organizations, associations, collectives, houses, trade unions, individuals, and municipalities. The growing community of adherents puts political pressure on existing institutions to recognize the text’s legality, with the hope that the document could be cited in court in support of spaces threatened with eviction.

The Convention on the Use of Space is one of a series of recent artistic and design projects that operate in the field of regulation and law. These projects take the form of codes, protocols, and legal documents, and range from the prototypical, to the paralegal, to the esoteric. “Document as Form” presents a collection of these projects, and aims to examine the opportunities of working at this level of invisible influence.

Like the other projects included in “Document as Form”, the Convention on the Use of Space operates not only as a symbolic gesture, claiming rights previously unacknowledged or ignored, but also as an actionable code of conduct, reconstructing how the systems of real estate proceed, and relocating power in the hands of the user. In the case of this contract and others in the collection, the creative project resides both in the act of writing the text and in its playing out over time. The project is realized when it is put into action, encountered by users. Rather than representing, translating or materializing the effects of these legal instruments, the authors participate directly in their production in order to uncover and influence structural issues of inequality, power, and discrimination.

These projects can’t stop the ideological systems ingrained in the laws that manage our lives. By engaging directly in the production of regulation, their makers complicate these systems, add friction, and write a way forward, offering new models for art and design to engage with justice. What happens, practically and parabolically, when designers consider the regulatory setting of their work, its ingrained ideologies, and the relationships implied therein as part of their theater of operations?