Unlearning Center is a forthcoming year-long program that will exist for anyone who is interested in a process of study-into-action about the interplay between art and the commons. Key questions include: How can we build the cultural institutions we want? How can arts and culture allow us to imagine and enact the commons? This program will emphasize unlearning, as well as embodied and artistic knowledge, using Casco Art Institute and its ecosystem as the whole context where “unlearning” takes place. The program aims to equip participants with the ability to find and create positions in the broader cultural and social field beyond traditional educational and cultural institutions.

Unlearning Center emerges to mark the end of an internship program at Casco Art Institute. The internship, often unpaid or underpaid, has been a point of attention from a perspective of fair and commoning practice, posing a question whether it offers a real opportunity to learn or a free or cheap labor subject to exploitation. The Unlearning Center offers an opportunity to learn and furthermore unlearn, including an an assumed hierarchy within the institution. The Unlearning Center enables participants a period of embedded learning in getting involved in the whole organization of Casco Art Institute, including daily team work and co-management/participation in collaborative art projects. This entails unlearning habits or unconscious knowledge while they learn anew around the commons. All these would take place in the formation of a community with the peer-participants as well as the Casco team and her ecosystem.

Structure

Each year a group of participants from Utrecht and elsewhere will be invited through an open call to take part in the program. The curriculum consists largely of monthly collective sessions of reading, discussion, exercises in experiment, individual secondment of 3 months period at the office and one of the projects at Casco, which can be doubled, depending on the participant’s interest, mentorship and reflection & publishing. A public lecture series will accompany the program that provides the basic knowledge on the commons, the role of art and how the commons and art can be applied in daily life as well as social organizations, and invites the public debates.

Payment

Participants will be offered a monthly stipendium whose amount we will determine with the outcomes of our fundraising effort.

Publishing / Reading

Unlearning Exercises: Art Organizations as Sites for Unlearning (eds. Binna Choi, Annette Krauss, Yolande van der Heide, Liz Allan, 2018, Valiz/Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons), an outcome of Casco’s 4 year long collaboration with artist Annette Krauss, will serve as the basic textbook to start with, accompanied by a reader. The participants will be required to publish additional exercises or adaptation/footnotes to the existing exercises, along with other reflective texts contributing to How to Casco-series. This will be published and shared in the next edition of Unlearning Center and also reposited in Casco’s digital platform, forming again art x knowledge common resources together and making them available for a wider public.

Praxis

The team at Casco looks forward to ways that the Unlearning Center will shape the organization of Casco itself into a more mutual, sustainable, and place of commoning, shifting a culture of unlearning on a daily basis!