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Casco, Utrecht & beyond., Lange Nieuwstraat 7, Utrecht (2026)

02/12/2025

Rerooting in the Polder (Aarden in de Polder) has come to a close, and we want to thank everyone who contributed—from the project’s early development through to its conclusion!

Together with Wapke Feenstra, we organized a series of public programs, engaging closely with our surroundings through field trips and shared reflection. During these tours, we learned from practitioners working across rural and artistic themes, traced how the polder landscape was shaped over time, listened to its sounds, and explored the grounds beneath our feet.

The exhibition concluded with the Farmers’ Market, welcoming visitors and partners, producers, and makers from the Rural School of Economics ecosystem. Over two days, the market became a space of exchange where trade, drawing, crafts, food, and other activities reflected the living, communal practices of Wapke’s network.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to all members of the ecosystem who helped facilitate these events:

Rural School of Economics Seminar: Indra Gleizde, Alina Dzeravianka, Zburazh Art Coop, Zoë Crevoisier, Inez Dekker, Anda Miščenko, Marta Zvejsalniece, Madison Katrina Flood, Genevieve Jacobs Hayes
From Field to Fiction: Laura van Rossum, Asia Komarova
Drilling for Stories: Kim Cohen
Sonic Diary: Reza Afisina, Katja Berends, Robida Collective
Farmers’ Market: Charles Esche, Ioana Lupascu, Gele Hailu, Meta Knol, Asia Komarova, Inez Dekker, Aria Spinelli, Hans Engberts, Julia and Sophia van der Putten

We also thank all volunteers, production teams, collaborators, and the many students and educators who visited.

Rerooting in the Polder (Aarden in de Polder) was made possible with the generous support of Stichting DOEN via Arts Collaboratory, VriendenLoterij Fonds, Mondriaan Fonds, K.F. Hein Fonds, Gilles Hondius Foundation, Boellaardfonds, and Gemeente Utrecht.

This journey has been a special one—we are excited to continue working with Wapke, carrying forward the relationships and practices that made it so meaningful.

— The team at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons

12/11/2025

Join us this weekend for the finnisage of Rerooting in the Polder with Wapke Feenstra!

For this special occasion, we organize Farmers’ Market at Casco – Sat-Sun, 12–18h

At the center is the Polder Trade table, where visitors learn from and chat with partners working at the crossroads of arts and agri-culture.

On Saturday, you meet Charles Esche, former Casco board member and Director of Van Abbemuseum, where he recently led the collective exhibition project Soils; Ioana Lupascu from the Seasonal Neighbors collective, who makes bors-based cocktails for the day; Aria Spinelli with her daughter Nila, who prepare bread and harvested olive oil from their farm in Italy; and Gele Hailu, a Hamar artist exploring questions around cattle and who collaborates closely with Wapke on our ongoing projects.

On Sunday, we welcome Meta Knol, who runs the Lakenvelder Boerderij Boterhuispolder with her partner Fernand de Willigen; Asia Komarova from Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills, who brings local vegetables and fruits from Leidsche Rijn; Inez Dekker, a rural sociologist working at Wageningen University; and the Casco team.

Visitors are invited to draw the two-centuries-old platanus tree, play with the harvested sounds from our Sonic Diary tour, and taste products by Boer Peter from Haarzuilens and Wei en Water from Boterhuispolder. Additional contributions are by Zeelanding festival’s Julia and Sophia van der Putten.

Wapke’s collaborator Hans Engberts leads a workshop on Sunday afternoon making baskets from willow twigs, as presented in the exhibition room A Polder Landscape

Expanding the market, the International Village Shop features merchandise and publications from the ecosystem of RSoE, including contributions from the Zburazh Art Coop collective and Gele Hailu, both part of the exhibition. Alongside, the Casco Kiosk presents crafts from our translocal lumbung and Arts Collaboratory networks, and beyond.

Come and experience the exhibition one more time. So many details and so many stories. Through her works, one can feel a village coming together, as we connect with craftspeople, farmers, artists, and other enthused souls!

10/10/2025

Coming up on Sunday, 19 October! Join us next week for Sonic Diary, where we together sonically thread through the polder of Leidsche Rijn and its surrounding edges in a day-long journey of recording and reading 📚🎒🎶

Participants are encouraged to capture sounds that embody the ambient poetics of a landscape shaped by human settlements — imagine the distant bellow of cows, the low hum of a tractor, or the reverberation inside a metal silo or construction site. During various stops, we collectively read aloud texts on topics such as commoning and land-use change.

This is our final public excursion of the Autumn show Rerooting in the Polder. Alongside Wapke Feenstra, the tour is guided by Reza Afisina, with a history in radio/field recording and member of our lumbung ecosystem and ruangrupa; Katja Berends, who co-organizes collective study through Reading Counterpower Amsterdam; and Luke Cohlen, sonic practitioner and member of the Casco team.

The sounds from the day are harvested and processed into a sound piece, which will be aired on Radio Robida — a broadcasting initiative of art collective Robida, based in Topolò, on the border of Italy and Slovenia 📻

Sunday, 19 Oct, 13:30–17:00
RSVP via [email protected] 📩
Location: Leidsche Rijn area – meeting point to be shared via email
Depending on the weather, we pick the location, adapting to an outdoors or sheltered version! 🚲🏡
Snacks provided. Bring a bicycle + recording device — this can also be your phone 🤳⏺️

Historically, the enclosure of common land marked a violent shift in relationships between people and territory, transforming shared resources into privatized property and displacing lives and practices. In the Netherlands, commoning took many forms over time: meents, marken, and other collective uses of land. Dikes and reclaimed lands were often managed collectively, and polders were frequently organized as cooperatives, but these were quickly prone to privatization as well. In this context, the activity reflects on how communities organize themselves from the bottom up and resist on this land in the face of ecological hazards and power dynamics.

Photos of the previous tour by Mirella Moschella.

02/10/2025

Thank you for joining us last Saturday! It was such a joy to see so many new and familiar faces come together for the opening of Wapke Feenstra’s Rerooting in the Polder (Aarden in de Polder).

Casco’s history with Wapke goes way back, as she has been a friend, collaborator, and partner in practice and thinking—through Myvillages, Rural School of Economics, and the lumbung network—exploring with us questions around urban, rural, and land commons, while following shared trajectories of ecological (un)learning. Aarden in de Polder is rooted in this enduring exchange. Long in the making, we are so happy to finally share the fruits of this project with you, and to celebrate its first public moment in such good company.

We acknowledge the many people who contributed to this project, whose practical experience and local knowledge enrich it in generative yet grounding ways. The exhibition brings together diverse disciplines and skills that characterise commons-oriented modes of working—contributions came from basket weavers, farmers, cheesemakers, artists, cultural workers, ecologists, geologists, archaeologists, and experts in water management and agricultural studies, to name just a few.

The journey continues! Join us for the excursions planned this Saturday 4 October (From Field to Fiction) as well as next week Saturday 11 October (Drilling for Stories) and Sunday 19 October (Sonic Diary). More info on casco.art

Supported by DOEN Foundation via Arts Collaboratory, VriendenLoterij Fonds, Mondriaan Fund, K.F. Hein Fonds, Gilles Hondius Foundation, Boellaardfonds, and the Municipality of Utrecht.

Photography by Wang Xue Sophia.

18/09/2025

Next week Saturday, on 27 September, we warmly welcome you to the opening of Rerooting in the Polder (Aarden in de Polder), our 2025 Autumn exhibition and public program with Wapke Feenstra and her extended ecosystem! 🐄

Co-initiator of Myvillages and Rural School of Economics, Frisian artist and long-term Casco collaborator Feenstra has spent decades exploring land ecologies through local knowledge and everyday experience. At Casco, she turns her focus to the Dutch polder, examining how it is lived and shaped culturally, socially, and economically. The project challenges narrow views of the polder as purely productive, foregrounding overlooked rural stories and imagining regenerative, relational futures that reroot in the landscape amid climate and ecological crises.

Doors open at 15:00, with words of welcome from the artist and the team at 16:00. Drinks and bites follow, and the exhibition is open for visitation between 15:00 and 18:00.

Address: Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Lange Nieuwstraat 7, Utrecht

We are also excited to present a lively public program as part of Rerooting in the Polder, developed in collaboration with Feenstra and her network of interlocutors. The events – including a seminar, excursions, and a market — take place on 28 September, 4, 11, and 19 October, and 15–16 November. 🚲 ⛏️ 🌀

Find details on our website, and please RSVP where indicated for any events that spark your interest!

Read more information on casco.art

Rerooting in the Polder is supported by DOEN Foundation, Vriendenloterij Fonds, Mondriaan Fund, K.F. Hein Fonds, Gilles Hondius Foundation, and the Municipality of Utrecht.

Moving image and design by David Bennewith (colophon.info) featuring tailored typography, shapes, and Casco’s house style alongside polder photography from Feenstra.

19/03/2025

We warmly invite you to join us this Saturday, 22 March, at 15:00 for the opening of our Spring program, Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song, featuring four proposals by Teresa Borasino, AZ OOR, Serena Lee, and Kristiina Koskentola. The schedule for the day is as follows:

15:00 Walk-in and exhibition visit
17:00 Welcome words by the Casco team and artists
18:50 Food by Rawan Boustany with tea and drinks

The proposals presented in the exhibition and public program Sensing the Ways explore situated ways of knowing that emerge through body and movement, shaped by deep connections with the land, more-than-human life worlds, and spirit.

We look forward to seeing you at Casco and to sharing in a meaningful gathering, bringing together the artists, collaborators, and the broader ecosystem.

Sensing the Ways is made possible by the financial support of Gemeente Utrecht, Mondriaan Fonds, and DOEN Foundation via Arts Collaboratory. In their artistic research and proposals, Teresa Borasino is supported by the European Cultural Foundation and Patagonia International Grants Program; Serena Lee by Canada Council for the Arts and Culture Moves Europe; and Kristiina Koskentola by The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux and Frame Finland.

07/03/2025

On 16 March from 17:00 to 20:00 a screening program is held in solidarity with Palestinian filmmaker Abdallah Motan. The program highlights his arrest and the impact of ongoing apartheid and military occupation in Palestine.

Abdallah is currently detained at the notorious Gush Etzion detention center near Al-Khalīl or Hebron city of Palestine. On 13 January, he was arrested by Israeli occupation forces and sentenced to a minimum of six months in administrative detention, which is characterized by the absence of concrete charges and trials.

The 29-year-old filmmaker is from Ramallah and has worked on numerous documentary projects not only in Palestine but also internationally. According to the CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists), Abdallah is among at least 43 film workers and journalists currently imprisoned by the Israeli occupation.

The event begins with a talk by film worker Salim Abu Jabal who is a colleague and close friend of Abdallah. Salim shares more information about Abdallah’s oeuvre and his current imprisonment, to raise awareness about his case, as but one of many Palestinian political prisoners. After Salim’s talk, two short films by Abdallah are on the program.

The first screened short film is RBG Kids (2022). Set in the Rashidiya camp in southern Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion, the film revolves around a group of children who resisted the attack. These children are the offspring of the Palestinian revolution whose stories are nearly four decades later finally brought to the screen by Abdallah.

Deferred Reclaim (2024) is screened next. The film recounts the experiences of mothers after the disappearance of their martyred loved ones. The narrative is shaped in the context of ongoing genocide, and the occupational practice of refrigerating deceased bodies instead of burial, which is practiced since 2015.

26/02/2025

In Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song, each artist brings forth exhibited works and public activities that engage with specific sites or regions and their histories:

Teresa Borasino carefully explores Quelccaya, the world’s largest tropical glacier, in the Peruvian Andes. Now at the risk of disappearing—along with the Indigenous communities, ancestral practices, and knowledge systems, it sustains and that sustain it—Quelccaya bears the pain of ongoing colonial violence and escalating lithium extraction. Borasino’s video installation traces the pulse of this wounded glacier as a living organism, intertwining its presence with anti-colonial narratives.

AZ OOR’s practice centers on the Amazigh movement. It proposes speculative narratives to explore and highlight the transnational networks that advocate for the cultural rights and resistance of this Indigenous group. Through Issaffen n Irifi (Rivers of Thirst in Amazigh), a scenography and storytelling circle, AZ OOR confronts colonial legacies, extractivism, and environmental destruction.

Serena Lee opens up her artistic research on taijiquan, a martial art developed in China with both combat and health applications, as a way of thinking through moving. Transforming the space, she invites us to spend time with the questions raised through this embodied practice, within various atmospheres for collective study. Playing with invited study partners who practise in different modes, the project finds different ways to pose the question: How do we know what we know?

Kristiina Koskentola presents works that channel and intertwine ancient shamanic philosophy and practice with contemporary thinking and futurist vision, developed in collaboration with Manchu shamanic composer Han Xiaohan. The project delves into these practices within the Taiga landscapes, reflecting on resilient, interconnected knowledges. The artists have been working together on the Finnish-Russian border, specifically in Karelia, around Lake Saimaa, and in Manchuria’s Daxinganling region along the Amur River—a natural border between China’s Northeast and Russia’s Far East.

Funders and image description in comments.

25/02/2025

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons presents the 2025 Spring Program, Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song, featuring artistic proposals by Teresa Borasino, AZ OOR, Serena Lee, and Kristiina Koskentola.

The proposals presented in the exhibition and public program Sensing the Ways inquire into situated ways of knowing that emerge through body and movement, shaped by deep connections with the land, more-than-human life worlds, and spirit. Integrating aesthetic, poetic, archival, and performative strategies, the artists’ works invite reflection on the possibilities that arise when knowing is reconceived as an embodied practice, one that is intimate and firmly rooted in emotional and reciprocal presence. Resisting forms of rationalization, they challenge modern/colonial epistemological frameworks.

Sensing the Ways further offers a thoughtful artistic consideration of the politics of knowledge regeneration. Tending to how the addressed forms of knowledge and ways of knowing move through and are reshaped across generations, geographies, and communities, the artists assert the vitality of alternative epistemologies in the present and the need for their ongoing renewal.

➰ How might attuning ourselves to sensory forms of knowing—generated through touch, story, movement, and song—bring about radical transformation? What might it mean to honor the ways knowledge travels and transforms across time, space, and being?

Come and join us for the festive opening of this exhibition program on 22 March, at 15:00, at Casco Art Institute in Utrecht. The day includes an introduction by our team, artist presentations, and more.

Stay tuned to our communication channels in the coming weeks for more details on the artistic proposals, the opening, and the many public activities that form Sensing the Ways.

Sensing the Ways is made possible with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund, the City of Utrecht, Stichting DOEN via Arts Collaboratory, The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, The Canada Council for the Arts, Patagonia International Grants, European Cultural Foundation, and Culture Moves Europe funded by the European Union.

18/02/2025

The book launch of Unlearning Routines of the Impossible, co-authored by Annette Krauss, turned out a lively and joyful gathering. We are deeply thankful to everyone who joined us for the occasion, including all the participants of the reading group who helped collectively shape the event! 🍾🎊📙

Throughout the day, we got to hear from Anja Groten, Sven Engels, Ola Hassanain, Aggeliki Diakrousi, and Wan Ing Que from Feminist Research Tools working group/Read-in collective; Nuraini Juliastuti from KUNCI Study Forum & Collective; and Nancy Jouwe in conversation with Annette and members of Casco Art Institute team. We were also honoured by the interventions of contributor Yolande van der Heide and co-editor Janine Armin ✨

The newly designed edition of Unlearning Exercises: Art Organizations as Sites for Unlearning, along with its sister publication Unlearning Routines of the Impossible, is available for purchase via our online shopping environment–please visit the link in bio.

Published by Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons and Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, Unlearning Routines of the Impossible has been made possible with the support of and the Austrian Science Fund.

16/02/2025

Coming up in the week ahead — .space
Relocate, Reorganize, Recirculate! Lumbung Kios Market

20–22 February 2025, 12:00–18:00 / Casco HQ

After traveling from documenta fifteen and temporarily finding shelter in Wapke Feenstra’s storage space at Myvillages (), the Lumbung Kios stock is on the move again—this time to Casco Art Institute. As these products, created by a translocal ecosystem across the world, find a new shared space, we invite you to a three-day Lumbung Kios Market to support their recirculation. By shopping, you actively support the evolving economy of this initiative.

Relocate, Reorganize, Recirculate! is an opportunity to explore how this collectivity-oriented trading system works and to learn about the imagination behind it. The market provides a space to hang out, connect, and get to know the stories behind each maker—forging new relationships along the way. The merchandise from different members of our ecosystem includes publications, artworks, shirts, and more.

Casco is open for informal visits throughout the market days, with extended hours on Thursday and Saturday.

Lumbung Kios is a decentralized, self-organized network of kiosks promoting sustainable selling, slow trade, and alternative economies. Inspired by Feral Trade, developed by Kate Rich, it supports Lumbung members, artists, and local ecosystems through collective practice and resource sharing.

Design by

10/02/2025

This Thursday is the fourth and final reading session of Unlearning Routines of the Impossible, our forthcoming publication co-authored by artist and long-time collaborator Annette Krauss, whose launch event is at Casco on Saturday!

In this session on 13 February, 17:00–19:00, we read the chapters “Letters: The Classroom is Burning, Let’s Dream About a School of Improper Education” by KUNCI Study Forum & Collective and “Afterword: Unlearning as a Scaffolding for Living.” Both challenge traditional education systems, advocating for relational, decolonial, and collaborative feminist and unlearning practices. These are paired with the short text “Tired in Archives”, reflecting on how libraries and archives are haunted by the ghosts of history.

Register for the sessions via [email protected] and receive the reading materials in advance.

We collectively discuss the questions harvested from the reading group during the launch event on Saturday, 15 February, from 15:00 to 18:00. During the event, Annette Krauss, Nancy Jouwe, Nuraini Juliastuti from KUNCI Study Forum & Collective, and members of the Feminist Search Tools are present, alongside the Casco team, to converse around and celebrate Unlearning Routines of the Impossible.

📖

Unlearning Routines of the Impossible is co-edited by Annette Krauss and Janine Armin and features contributions from the Feminist Search Tools working group, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Nancy Jouwe, KUNCI Study Forum & Collective, and Ferdiansyah Thajib. The design is by Rosen Eveleigh. It is published by Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons and Minor Compositions/Autonomedia.

This book has been made possible with the financial support of Mondriaan Fonds and the Austrian Science Fund.

Image description: Photos from the respective chapters in the book and a social media tile designed by Rosen Eveleigh in the identity of the new books, which features information on the reading groups.

Casco, Utrecht & beyond.

02/12/2025

12/11/2025

10/10/2025

02/10/2025

18/09/2025

19/03/2025

07/03/2025

26/02/2025

25/02/2025

18/02/2025

16/02/2025

10/02/2025

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