Launch day Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons

On Saturday, June 9, 2018, 3–10pm, we celebrate the launch of Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, with “FAQs on the Commons & Art,” the opening of Casco’s Office Gallery, the new Casco identity and modus operandi, and more.

With:
Contributors to the “FAQs on the Commons & Art” roundtables and working sessions—Arts Collaboratory (Cráter Invertido, DOEN Foundation), Michel Bauwens, The Black Archives, FILMIS: Filipino Migrants in Solidarity, Katherine Gibson, Indonesian Migrant Workers Union, Annette Krauss, Geert Lovink, Dorothé Lucassen, Massimiliano Mollona, Soheila Najand, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Vluchtmaat, and Aimée Zito Lema. 

Artists Falke Pisano and Riet Wijnen, who will discuss their redesign of Casco’s workspace, which now comprises a gallery space. Office Gallery is a new feature of Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons that brings art into our daily working environment, and further diversifies Casco’s commons economy. Throughout the year, Office Gallery presents artworks relevant for project research and for Casco’s Ecosystem in our office environment. 

Graphic designer David Bennewith with Bram van den Berg, for the new visual identity of Casco. 

Asia Komarova and Txell Blanco Diaz of The Outsiders; core contributors of Erfgoed (Agricultural Heritage and Land Use) including artists Avan Omar, Merel Zwarts, and Patricia Jiménez López; and vegan chef Mari Pitkänen.

As an art institution, Casco has always been invested in the process of instituting and becoming-with, especially in dialogue with artists and other practitioners. This event, however, marks a significant point of transition for Casco that is manifested in its new name: Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. On Saturday, June 9 we will celebrate this moment together, while sharing with the public some of Casco’s work in progress.

Casco understands the commons as a verb and as an ongoing, if not slow, practice. In “working for the commons” then, Casco has been focusing both on the “front side” of the institution—namely, on programing, projects, and presentations—and on the reproductive aspects of instituting that happen mostly in the background—the team, the Ecosystem, its working environment and infrastructure, the economies and common-pool resources, and ways to co-manage and share the commons against the increasing privatized structures of power. Casco focuses on the agency of art in its enquiring, imaginative, and inventive modalities to engage with the practice of the commons. At the launch, the Casco team and extended team will discuss how they have been working, give an update on Casco’s new modus operandi, and present some of the initial outcomes from the new modality of work. 

The day will be interwoven with roundtables and working sessions on “FAQs on the Commons & Art.” Situating the commons in between the public and the private, Casco considers the commons as both a practice and as a performative and interventionist concept that moves in tandem with practice. Therefore, the commons calls for constant questioning and dialogue around everything from its definitions to the “how-to.” The launch extends this ethos with generous contributions from active commoning practitioners from in and out of the field of art, all of whom form the Casco Ecosystem.  

The first presentation in the Office Gallery, Statement One: Exchange Value, brings together the works of Falke Pisano and Riet Wijnen with the newly commissioned furniture they have designed for Casco’s office. Pisano’s The Value in Mathematics (2015) and Wijnen’s Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction (2015–) center the conversational mode to examine the cultural dominance of modernity through mathematics and abstraction respectively. The works trouble the universalizing epistemology of the Western progressive lens. 

The soirée of the launch day will take place at Terwijde farmhouse, where the project Erfgoed (Agricultural Heritage and Land Use) is located. Erfgoed is a first for the Center for Ecological (Un)learning, a long-term co-initiative by Casco and The Outsiders—of which the latter will give the public an animating tour of the emergent farmhouse activities, from soft infrastructures to its non-human inhabitants. 

Please find the details of the program on our website. If you are unable to join us, the event will be recorded and made available via casco.art. Casco.art will also be launched on June 9, together with commons.art. 

The furniture by Falke Pisano and Riet Wijnen is produced with support from the Rijksakademie. The Casco Office Gallery was conceived of in collaboration with Falke Pisano and Riet Wijnen, and Statement One: Exchange Value is shared with Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam. Office Gallery is open Monday–Friday, 12–6pm, and by appointment.

Casco’s program is made possible with financial support from City Council of Utrecht, Mondriaan Fund, and DOEN Foundation via Arts Collaboratory.