September 2023
Contributing some thoughts on Casco’s practices of Unlearning
Between formal and informal discussions with Marianna Takou, executive director of Casco, Aline Hernández, artistic director of Casco, Sari Dennise, their comrade, designer and member of the Cráter Invertido Cooperative (Mexico) and the Arts Collaboratory ecosystem, other members of Casco’s community and exhibition visitors, we shared meals, been toured by Müge Yilmaz, artist and co-founder of the queer-eco-feminist art project Four Siblings, around the community garden of the initiative, exchanged references on critical thinking, commoning ethos and solidarity-based interconnection of art initiatives. We explored ideas of collaboration within and against contemporary dominant modes of cultural production, towards approaches of interdependence, mutuality and care.
Our bodies are time-machines, I remember reading somewhere during my first visit to Casco, and it stuck in my mind as a primary point of observation in the various methods, practices and exercises that the collective performs from time to time. Time comes as the core issue, after the recognition that our everyday times and spaces are limited in instant encounters or interactions, rendering it at least difficult to build alternative collective behaviours, let alone community bonds. Challenging the ways in which culture and knowledge are being produced, could reveal new ways not only critical to the established dominant ones, but also in a direction that transgresses them. The mapping of everyday habits enables critical reflection on personal actions in dialogue with those of the collective, in terms of needs and common aspirations. Peculiar action-designs, such as the Unlearning Exercises, that were attempted in collaboration with the artist Annette Krauss, are helping us to rethink the relational dynamics of our encounters and the spatial tactics that enable and establish them on the basis of a perpetual present. Collective imaginative acts of performing collaborative gestures could lead us to the construction of a subjectivity with an ethos of mutuality and care against pervasive individualism and social isolation.
Another example of performing a call for collaboration is the Nina bell F. House Museum exhibition; the opening of the institution’s archive publicly to the visitor. Having been built as a common ground, it is narrating the memory of Casco, by exhibiting at the same time successes, achievements, moments of change, mappings for the redefinition of the group, the reorientation of its practices, showing moments of development of new expectations and queries. Simultaneously, the exhibition is being communicated as an invitation, through space, for participation. The visitor can contribute not only to the unfolding of these moments while exploring them, but also as an archivist -from an inside position now- to inhabit it as a constant space-in-the-making, that encourages depositing new speeches or other traces, forming a landscape of correlation and potential reference.
A potentially distinctive way of Casco to provide us a mechanism for cultivating the imagination for new subjectification endeavours, is the playful gestures of hybridization. The synthesis of well-known established social meanings, such as the House-Museum title of the archive-public and the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills project, constitutes an unfamiliarisation process that could indicate new forms of openness. While composing pre-existing established concepts, it produces a new field for the “unknown” to emerge and forms new horizons of alliance’s possibilities. Resembling passages of negotiation, between the home space and the museum space, succeeds to suggest new meaning-making methods, understanding and framing the lived spatial experiences. Through these playful inventions, the spatial references and dynamics of the hybrid, engaged, artistic practices transform both perceptions and materialities, as it usually does the space of playing, which function simultaneously as an embodied form of knowledge production and at the same time as an instant realization of the space of possibilities.
