Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons will slow down into winter hibernation, with doors closed from 22 December to 5 January.
With 2025 coming to an end, we extend our warmest gratitude to everyone who engaged with Casco Art Institute – visitors, artists, practitioners, students, and all those who shaped our programs. As a place for art and gathering, Casco deeply values the relationships that nourish our ecosystem and the support of our funders.
Across a year of shifting seasons, Casco moved through a constellation of projects, gatherings, and collaborations that shaped our shared practice.
In spring, we launched our multiyear program Changing the Fabric of the Night Sky, tending to forms of knowledge production and relational forms of living that move across cultures, communities, and the more-than-human worlds. The program opened with the exhibition Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song, where Teresa Borasino, AZ OOR, Serena Lee, and Kristiina Koskentola presented haptic, layered works alongside seminars and workshops that brought their often-overlooked themes into embodied practice.
As autumn arrived, Casco turned its attention to the rural with Rerooting in the Polder by Wapke Feenstra and her extended ecosystem. Building on Feenstra’s long-term artistic practice, the project took shape across Casco and the surrounding region, bringing together a diverse and, at times, delightfully unexpected public through playful and experimental approaches to land, economy, and everyday life.
This year also saw the release of three new publications: Unlearning the Routines of the Impossible, a redesigned edition of Unlearning Exercises (both with Minor Compositions), and Monument Zero. Find them in our bookshop.
Students were closely involved in our programs: the HKU Master of Fine Arts group co- and self-organized activities, while teaching took place within lumbung Practice at the Sandberg Instituut, in partnership with de Appel and Gudskul. Students from academies near and far joined exhibition tours throughout the year, deepening their engagement with the themes that guide our work.
Transdisciplinary work extended through collaborations with academic institutions, including Utrecht University’s Tackling the Polycrisis, Whose Ocean? (both part of Pathways to Sustainability), and AndersUtrecht, as well as through the SPACEX network, among many others.
Furthermore, markets were organized to activate community economies – in the spirit of our translocal Arts Collaboratory and lumbung networks – offering accessible ways for the public to experience Casco for the first time.
Beyond these initiatives, we actively hosted screenings and radio programs for Palestine.
We have been witnessing the most horrific and unimaginable violence unfolding this year. Yet people continue to find the strength to gather in solidarity, organize, and come together in countless ways. In this spirit, we reaffirm our dedication to reciprocal and regenerative ways of living.
We wish everyone a reflective end of the year and look forward to reconnecting in January.
