Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons (Utrecht) - Partner since 2007
Casco's imaginative and radically non-hierarchical interventions in complex social processes have proved highly inspirational to DAI students who are equally uninterested in the discourse of the mainstream art world, but who are instead much more interested in the forms of sophisticated art activism of the post-industrial urban context practiced by spaces such as Casco. Furthermore, Casco's fresh, experimental and very smart approaches to art, design and theory as energetically interlinked categories make them the ideal curator for our Publishing Class. Beginning their educational relationship with the DAI with the project We Correspondents in 2009 , and gradually developing a very specific curriculum oriented around the act of publishing as a critical art practice that cultivates publicness and allows for forms of dissemination that challenge the constraints of time and space, Casco has over the years invited exactly those artists and thinkers to team up with our students - including Zachary Formwalt, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Can Altay, Natascha Sadr Haghghian & Ashkan Sepahvand, Annette Krauss, Chto Delat, AA Bronson, Marina Vishmidt, Christian Nyampeta and many others - who we feel are directly related to the students' existential, political and artistic concerns. In the Publishing Class, students feel that their publishing skills are honed and encouraged in a critical and yet warm and extremely hospitable environment. Last year's project How To Live Together was so highly valued by the participants that a majority of them decided to decline the offer of selecting an alternative project for their second year, as they were very enthusiastic about continuing their commitment to the Publishing Class instead.
Projects Casco for DAI :
http://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/1627/publishing-class
Articles about Casco:
Why the Artworld Needs Feminist Economics
https://temporaryartreview.com/elephants-in-the-room-at-casco-art-institute/