28 May–10 July 2022
Opening: 28 May 2022, 15:00 at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons (Lange Nieuwstraat 7, Utrecht)
Admission is free. Please visit our access note.
Channeling the theme Culture for Resilience, Casco Art Institute and The Outsiders are excited to invite you to the very first exhibition of Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills with its collection.
Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills (TFM) was established by Casco Art Institute and The Outsiders in 2020 after our joint initiative of commoning of a dysfunctional farmhouse Terwijde surviving the urbanization of Leidsche Rijn in the province of Utrecht. Once a peripheral, vast farmland catering food to the city, Leidsche Rijn is now occupied by housing blocks and over forty thousands human habitants. Deprived of its surrounding farmland, the farmhouse we activated was eventually sold to a private developer and soon to be re-opened as a restaurant. Yet our commoning journey has continued. Soon after leaving the farmhouse, we launched the museum to explore the agricultural past and present of the area and connect with old and new farming initiatives to learn and share forgotten skills of living together with nature. Commoning here wasn’t defeated, it took other forms – such as travelling together to farm sites, connecting, and co-un/learning with a mobile architecture. This architecture also houses a growing collection of objects, knowledge, skills and stories, and above all, relationships among farmers, citizens, artists and other non-human beings.
Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills 2022 Spring Collection show is the first collection-exhibition of the museum. Here, we are metaphorically and literally cleaning and sorting out “things” stocked not only in the depot of TFM in Leidsche Rijn, but left in the minds of many who were part of the journey of the museum. The exhibition examines what resources and relationships have been cultivating over last two special years – overlapping the pandemic time – in order to share them with a wider public. In this light, there’s no surprise that Culture for Resilience makes a theme for the collection. The collection presents cultural tools for resilient living in times of multifaceted crises – with appreciation of commons, ecology and heritage. The accompanying program includes the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills’ regular tours and vibrant educational program for children and youth – and thus also offers the opportunity to experience and learn from the museum beyond the collection.
