1 July 2013–1 May 2014 / Casco HQ
From Spring 2013 to Summer 2014, Aimée Zito Lema is Casco’s second Artist at Work. Zito Lema lives and works in Amsterdam. Involving a local artist emphasized the Artist at Work program’s continued efforts to share an intensive working period together both within and beyond our national borders. The common denominator within Artist at Work remains collaboration. Like Nyampeta, Zito Lema worked with various communities and groups that are affiliated with Casco. With her interest in labor conditions and working cooperatives, Zito Lema is particularly connected to (Un)usual Business, Casco’s long-term research collaboration with Kritische Studenten Utrecht that explores “community economies.”
In 2013, Zito Lema and Casco organized the Rietveld crate chair workshops Sitting Is a Verb – Rietveld for (Un)usual Business, furniture for the first Conversation Market, the film screening and conversation How can one leave our beloved ones with such joy?, and the children’s textile workshop Warp and Weft. In March and April 2014, Zito Lema hosted a series of workshops under the title (Un)usual Business School of Cooperation, during which participants worked together to acquire a particular set of skills (like printing posters, recycling wood and assembling aprons), while discussing how cooperation was both mentally and physically embedded in their everyday practices and questioning what values and affects these practices elicit. The results of Zito Lema’s Artist at Work period were presented in the installation Body at Work. Rehearsing Cooperations as part of the research exhibition New Habits (1 May–13 July 2014).
Aimée Zito Lema was born in Amsterdam and grew up in Buenos Aires where she studied at the University of the Arts (IUNA). In 2003 she moved to Amsterdam to continue studying at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, where she graduated from the Fine Arts Department in 2007. From 2009 till 2011 Zito Lema took part in a Master Program for Artistic Research at the Royal Academy in The Hague. She has had various exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad.
