fot 1. [A knife inscribed ‘I love you in the name of the commons’, a farewell gift from Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide to the Casco team, in the hands of Yolande and Binna Choi. 2019. Photo by Binna Choi]
Commoning an art organization – Imagining an art institution as a tree
fot. 2 [History of (name) change of Casco, 2018. Image by Binna Choi and Ika Putranto]
Imagining an art institution as a tree allows us to think of growth in a different way than what colonial capitalism compelled us to do, namely in terms of expansion, extraction, exploitation and profits. The so-called edifice complex is coupled with museums that, as a meme says, ‘are designed to preserve the inert and exclude the living’. Even though the (art) objects in museums are not as inert as we think and the simple binary of the dead in contrast to the living may no longer be valid, most museum protocols point at the opposite. What would an art museum be like if it were a tree?
It would be part of a forest of small to mid-size art institutions that sprung up in the 1990s across the globe – that is ‘in the era of globalization’ – unlike the 19th-century bourgeois or state model art institutions like museums with collections. The Casco Art Institute has been growing for 33 years now. First it was meant to fill a gap and be a public platform for presenting works by artists from the city of Utrecht and elsewhere in the Netherlands. After about five years it evolved into treating its space as a multi-functional studio for research, experimentation, production, discussion and presentation while going out into the ‘public’ space and working with artists from other parts of Europe. This made Casco be known as Casco Projects, as the domain of the Casco website was called at the time when the Internet became part of everyday life. The director at that time, Lisette Smits, told me once that Deschooling Society (1971) by Ivan Illich was her bible for directing the institution, which actually has to do with deinstitutionalisation of both art and education or even beyond that of living and being. The following directors, Emily Pethick and myself, did not digress from that but joined the pursuit of this cause with different strategies, methods and practices. As a strategic move to articulate its position within the Dutch contemporary art and cultural landscape, the Casco team and board added a new subtitle to Casco, calling it Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory. During the time of receiving this name, Casco enhanced the focus on an interdisciplinary and participatory approach in art practice. The languages of graphic or architectural design were tested, and their experimental forms offered a support structure as well as spatial or literary expression to what Casco and artists do. The following phase up until now has been marked by another change in the institution’s name into Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. Guided by the process of researching the notion of the commons and how art is related to that with a number of artists, local students and neighbours, the Casco team and artist Annette Krauss took on the process of unlearning Casco’s way of working in order to shape its relationship with the commons. This process coincided with Casco engaging with the self-transformative process of the Arts Collaboratory network consisting of similar kinds of art institutions, which, however, were located in the so-called Global South, and soon after that with the agro-ecological history of Leidsche Rijn, a newly urbanised area of Utrecht with the Outsiders collective. In other words, the institution’s own journey of decolonising its scope and mode of working slowly led it to be open, wide and rich in its relationality with ‘others’ or rather ‘one another’ as you move away from assuming the world is organised around the principle of ‘us versus the others’ but within the forest of the minor art institutions, as one could say. Recently Casco made a public announcement about its ‘ecosystemic shift’, which suggests a new mode of governance and economy in a communing institution. We are going to see how this will evolve again, especially as our ecosystem at large on a planetary level is going through the drastic if not catastrophic change.
fot. 3 [If we remain silent, performance conceived by Ana Bravo Perez, under the over 150 years old Plane tree at the courtyard Abraham Dolehof at Casco Art Institute, 2 September 2023. Photo by Francisco Baquerizo Rancines]
What do the commons look like?
What are the Commons? What do the commons look like? Ironically the concept of the Commons seems to be popular but not so common in its understanding and use. Indeed, it’s a buzzword that resonates and at the same time confuses many. In brief, the Commons can be defined as a collectively managed common resource, autonomously ruled by its managing community, who focus on tangible qualities such as land and intangible qualities such as knowledge and culture.[1] Keeping this definition in mind, a collective farm under a communist regime could well be distinguished from the commons as those who labour on the farm do not create the rules. A gated community could well be the commons. It might be comparable to the cases of Airbnb or Uber, which constitute the so-called ‘sharing economy’. They become popular, adopted by the state to promote, and often treated as the synonym of the commons, but they are not. Korean political scientist Hyo Jeong Chai argues the sharing economy and the Commons are not actually for ‘sharing’. First, the commons belong to everybody and everyone. The Commons in Uber is merely the sum of each respective resource. This sum is not shared, only the information on each individual resource. Second, the rules of management are created by those who create these platforms, not by their users. Third, the ‘profits’ from the platform are not shared for the community—again, this is individual profit. Four, those platforms do not cultivate or sustain relations and qualities like trust. In fact, at the bottom of these platforms’ blockchain technology (a key figure of the sharing economy), lies technology to secure trust based on the premise that human relationship is not reliable. On these grounds, Chai concludes:
Nowadays, a sharing economy is a new stage and another name for privatization. The slogan ‘Let’s share instead of possess—in fact, let’s borrow’ sounds like a praise of non-possession of individuals, but it conceals the avoidance of employment and irresponsibility of capital in reality. At the same time, it justifies the techniques of isolating and incapacitating individuals through a symbolic manipulation of ‘sharing’ by depriving them of solidarity and relationship. Not everything with a form of sharing only can be regarded as sharing; philosophy and value of sharing are required. From the beginning, a sharing economy was a mistranslated term and its indiscriminate use has caused great confusion. Therefore, its original concept of sharing has been damaged. What we call a sharing economy now is nothing but a methodological innovation of making a form of sharing to be traded in the market. It is ‘an economy destroying sharing’ as well as a ‘marketization of sharing’[2].
In my view, this ‘big chaos’ created by the misuse of the notion of sharing, and possibly the notion of the Commons, is not simply negative or positive. Instead we can see a paradigm shift, which encourages each single person to recognise their agency, and challenges the concentrated power and authority that the state and institutions have enjoyed. We could call this paradigm shift the commons. The question is whether we can leverage this to another advanced level of privatisation and capitalism, or something radically different that stops the exploitation of the Earth and body, and affirms the joy of life for more. So again, we have to make a distinction in the notion of the commons. Rather, we need to refine it as we use the commons. Italian legal scholar and activist Ugo Mattei [3] gives a relevant framework for the Commons, positioning it in the Western legal tradition or ‘a legality that is founded on the universalizing and exhaustive combination of individualism with the State/private property dichotomy’. Furthermore, his crucial insight is in articulating the fabricated clear-cut opposition between the state and the private is in fact made in an even more fundamental hierarchal, binary structure. ‘The rule of a subject (an individual, a company, the government) over an object (a private good, an organisation, a territory).’ The Commons are conceived beyond objects-resources, he continues to argue:
Commons lie beyond the reductionist opposition of ‘subject-object’, which produces the commodification of both. Commons, unlike private goods and public goods, are not commodities and cannot be reduced to the language of ownership. They express a qualitative relation. It would be reductive to say that we have a common good: we should rather see to what extent we are the commons, in as much as we are part of an environment, an urban or rural ecosystem. Here, the subject is part of the object. For this reason, commons are inseparably related and link individuals, communities, and the ecosystem itself.[4]
On this basis, the critical task for the commons is to set up ‘a qualitative relation’ that connects many, from individual human beings to institutions, companies and even the Earth itself. Yet, how? We know it’s a daunting task. Relationality is not always pleasant (as in ‘relational aesthetics’) and can be peaceful as dreamed with the satellite image of the ‘whole Earth’ transmitted to the world through the 1960s hippie culture. The commons often accompany a circle shape to represent themselves. The circle gives an idea of the holistic completeness and integrity. However, we may better imagine the commons as an indefinite, non-static grid structure. Although the grid might be considered a shape of control—like Excel sheets making things quantifiable and calculable—we also can use it to care for and attend to various human and non-human actors, situations and environments. Alternatively, we can think of another image-shape of the commons. Belgian philosopher Pascal Gielen designates the commons as a new, radical, practise-based ideology reconfiguring many binary and oppositional relations—and as monster. Eventually a “forbidden love”:
Compared to the smooth and monochromatic, marble aesthetics of neoliberalism and virtual capital, commonism, at first sight, seems to be giving birth to a particularly ungainly child. What it presents is truly a monster, reconciling everything that is in fact irreconcilable. Those who immerse themselves in social life for the first time indeed tend to miss the simplicity of numbers, the helicopter view of statics and the abstract beauty of sound mathematical proof. In addition, the working, stressed-out bodies that populate the social domain produce a bouquet of sometimes poignant odours. The financial economy can only maintain its clean, pure form by keeping bodies and polluting practices at a safe distance. In the commons, however, economy and labor are reunited, as things are reunited with people, people with animals, culture with nature, the young with the old, including colors and shapes that frequently clash. People sometimes engage in verbal fights, only to embrace each other intimately at other times. Perhaps the best analogy for commonism is forbidden love.[5]
Is love, especially forbidden love, a visible matter? Does it have shape? What do the commons look like?
An image of the commons: a desk of one’s own
fot. 4 [Seven tables for Casco conceived by artists Falke Pisano and Riet Wijnen as part of their long-term plan to change the Casco’s office environment, 2018. Photo by Angela Tellier]
While there can be no commons without a community that takes care of and benefits from the commons together, this does not mean there has to be a collective or collectivity in all aspects and all the time. In fact, in shifting to Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons – from a mode of representing to a mode of practicing and sharing the commons – more attention was given to each individual in the team as symbolised by the replacement of a big collective office table by several individually customized desks in different sizes. In a hierarchal structure governed by the public or private rule, power is centred on a few selected individuals in management and the rest of the team are subjected to the decisions made by them and somehow remain replaceable as per their functions. As a team making a transition from a public or private body to the commons, that meant for us that each person is ensured of her, his or their own subjectivity as a practitioner of the commons, and we hold on to an awareness and responsible acts that imply we are taking care of the institution together. This assurance was made through how each person feels connected and committed to what we called study lines, each of which includes a wider community of shared concerns. The notion of study was inspired by Fred Moten and Stephano Harney[6] as a way of learning and living by acting and planning together in resistance to oppression, indebted to the anti-slavery struggles, and if possible with the sense of prophecy of what to come. The ‘study lines’ are our own term for the key areas of commoning.
The team indeed has been changing in this regard, and it’s important that no team remains the same, and this aspect of individual transformation along with a collective transformation has to extend beyond the team, involving collaborators and co-learners while the boundary between the team and the ecosystem dissolves, facilitating movement and on-going reconfiguration in the ecosystem. In the commons, I believe, everyone has to be a leader who knows which person or thing should take their turn of leadership and who knows how and when to act as an assistant. This goes against the undiscriminating idea of a flat horizontal hierarchy. Of course there is already a sense of deep caution of a mob when different scales of the commons are imagined, let alone gated communities and other enclosures. We need to see stars, be stars, and stars are together and far away to make up the universe. Last but not least, at the same time, the precondition for this kind of leadership should be that it has its foot down on earth, for which ‘cleaning’ could stand as a synecdoche.
fot. 5 [Casco Art Institute’s Study Lines (2018–2022) diagram by Binna Choi and David Bennewith, printed on fabric as part of Nina bell F. House Museum at Casco Art Institute, 2023. Photo by Chun Yao Lin]
Cleaning habit for the commons
fot. 6 [Casco team and Annette Krauss, Cleaning Together (with Mierle), 2014, a staged version of one of the exercises of Site for Unlearning (Art Organization). Photo by Annette Krauss]
Cleaning our office together is one of many exercises that the Casco team and Annette Krauss tried as a strategy of unlearning our anxiety-driven busyness, which stems from our habitual desire for productivity and expanding, competitive business. While some exercises like ‘reading together’, ‘mood colour’ or ‘property relations’[7] were tried once, others, like cleaning, have been made into the ritual and habit. It is significant in many ways. One is the recognition of perpetual inequality in gender and race as we can see those originating from the former colonies come and clean homes and offices in the countries of the colonizers. In the developed world, still many more women or especially women of colour than any men babysit and cook for children, especially away from their own home. This has to do with how coloniality persists in the modality of capitalism and how it perpetuates to undervalue the realm of reproductive labour or rather depends on its being cheap or free labour, all the while separating the productive and the reproductive, and making the latter invisible. This can be seen in the self-(re)producing natural ecosystem as well. The labour of nature is completely ignored. Nature is only seen as a source for exploitation and extraction which has been leading our time to being an era of mass extinction.
In the way the question ‘Who cleans the world?’ led Françoise Verges[8] to examine decolonial feminist struggles in critiquing white-women-centred feminism, the act of cleaning together led us to examine different domains of reproductive labour and to seek the possibility of undoing the separation of production and reproduction. Faisol Iskandar, a leader of the migrant domestic workers’ movement in the Netherlands, has told us and above all showed us how cleaning defines what leadership should be about. It’s not about resting in an armchair while someone else is cleaning for you. It is cleaning, cooking, taking care of people to support life in your community and wider ecosystem. Silvia Federici, co-founder of the Wage for Housework movement, also argued “the “commoning” of the material means of reproduction is the primary mechanism by which a collective interest and mutual bonds are created.” [9]
‘The commons provide services which are often taken for granted by their users: those who benefit from the commons do not take into account their intrinsic value, only acknowledging it once the commons are destroyed and substitutes need to be found. To some extent, the universal services provided by the commons are similar to household work, never noticed when the work is being done. Only when no one is there to do the dishes, you notice its value. In other words you don’t miss something until it is gone. Two striking examples of this feature are represented by mangroves and by coral barriers: people living on the coasts are not able to estimate the value of the services they provide simply because they don’t even know that these goods have a specific function, that they are doing something for them. Only when a Tsunami hits, destroying villages, the value of such vegetation becomes apparent. However, prior to their destruction, mangroves played a major role in protecting coastal villages from tsunami waves. It would be highly expensive to build a similar barrier artificially.’[10]
fot. 7 [What to Unlearn, 2014, image by the Casco team and Ester Bartel]
In the name of Nina – a feminist, commonist reconstruction
fot. 8 [Evolution of the portraits of Nina bell. F. Left to right: a drawing by Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, photos of bean paste ball in fermentation initiated by Donghwan Kam at Nina bell F. House Museum, photographed by Binna Choi and Marianna Takou, and lino print by Binna Choi]
The figure of Nina bell F.was conceived around 2016 by (ex-)employees, artists and cultural practitioners at Casco Art Institute out of a shared concern to care for and maintain the ongoing practice of commoning and to unlearn current practices with the aid of art beyond oppressive institutional boundaries and habits. Their/her name conjures up the artistic, Black, feminist and political engagements of Nina Simone, bell hooks and Silvia Federici. As Nina continues to live, the practices of many others are called upon, keeping her/them as a collective figuration that transcends individual personhood and institution/organization as well as the ordinary divisions of artwork, labour and life.
The House Museum was created to manifest the embodiment of Nina, offering the public a way to recognize and possibly be part of Nina. The Nina bell F.House Museum collects and shares ephemera, left-over objects, notes, snapshots, among other (accidental yet telling) things unearthed from the archives of the Casco Art Institute’s exhibitions, projects and collaborations each of which tells the story of Nina. It foregrounds the non-conventional practices of archiving at the heart of small institutions which often remain invisible, undervalued and overlooked due to the culture of visibility and the accelerative and extractive modus operandi prevailing in our time. Simultaneously, the House Museum works at odds with other institutionalized archival practices that tend to hoard, guard and stall archives by insisting on forms of openness, vitality and deliberation where the collection is made accessible for use, contribution, co-creation, exchange and circulation over time. The museum itself may be small, but it is potentially ubiquitous, looking static but keeps on breeding different beings who find a way of living together and transforming together. A series of small ‘fermentation houses’ as the House Museum’s architecture were provided by Amsterdam-based artist Donghwan Kam, they indicate that the dwelling place of Nina exists beyond the visible and physical realm while sheltering and making a new alchemy to be collectively tasted.
fot. 9 [Archival installation view, Nina bell F. House Museum at Casco Art Institute, 2023. Photo by Chun Yao Lin]
This text is adapted and developed from the text commissioned and published by Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau for the third edition of its E-Journal Digital Atlas (2023).
[1] Thanks to the founder of P2P foundation Michel Bauwens.
[2] Hyo Jeong, Chai, ‘Sharing Economy’, Workers 47, October 23, 2018, http://workers-zine.net/29544. Translation by Binna Choi
[3] Ugo Mattei,‘The State, the Market, and Some Preliminary Questions about the Commons’ (French and English version) University of Turin and IUC Research Commons, 2011; http://ideas.iuctorino.it/RePEc/iuc-rpaper/1-11_Mattei.pdf
[4] Mattei, ibid.
[5] Pascal Gielen, ‘Common aesthetics: the shape of a new meta-ideology’, in Commonism: A new Aesthetics of the Real, eds, Nico Docks and Pascal Gielen, Amsterdam, Valiz, 2018, pp 80–81.
[6] Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Minor Compositions, 2013
[7] For more information on the unlearning exercises, please refer to Valiz with Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. Unlearning Exercises: Art Organization as Sites for Unlearning, 2018, https://casco.art/resource/unlearningexercises/
[8] Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism, Pluto Press, 2021 (the original French edition was published in 2019)
[9] Silvia Federici, “Feminism and the politics of the Common in an era of primitive accumulation”, in Revolution at point zero: housework, reproduction and feminist struggle, NY, PM Press, 2012, p. xx
[10] Ibid, Mattei.
