Binna Choi is director of Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, formerly Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She conceived and co-developed with the team and numerous others a long-term and composite artistic research project like Grand Domestic Revolution (2009/2010-2013) and the three-year interdisciplinary and artistic research programme (2013-2015) Composing the Commons; a has been part of the faculty of the Dutch Art Institute /Masters of Fine Arts Programme in Arnhem; and working for and with a trans-local network Arts Collaboratory (2013 – ongoing) and Cluster, a network of European art organizations focusing on art and its context (2012 – ongoing). Her curatorial projects also include three day seminar Cultivate or Revolutionize?: Life Between Apartment and Farmland at Times Museum, Guangzhou (2014, with Nikita Choi) and summer school and exhibition Group Affinity at Kunstverein Munich (2011, with Bart van der Heide). For the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016) in South Korea she worked as the curator. As part of her practice, she also engages with writing, editing, publishing, and contributing to discursive platforms with lectures, discussion and workshops and taking on advisory-supportive roles as well.
CASCO (www.casco.art)
Recalling the words of scholar of the feminist commons Silvia Federici, it is important not to perceive public space and the city primarily in terms of quantities but rather as forms of relations. We would like to present Casco foremost as a complex web of various entangled relations. These relations are those that strive for social change, with, or in affinity with art in common. Casco exists in Utrecht, working across art and academia. More broadly, it is situated in the Netherlands alongside many peer art institutions, (art & design) schools, activist groups, and organizations. This continues at a global level, as Casco works across the so-called global “north and the south,” “east and the west” as seen in the case of our Arts Collaboratory network or with the 2016 gathering of 106 small-mid scale organizations co-organized by us under the title “To All the Contributing Factors” for the 10th Gwangju Biennale. It’s from this thick web of relations, and always in public, that we raise a new flag high on our façade that reads: “Casco Art Institution: Working for the Commons.”
Taking the notion of the commons, we want to highlight that many social and political issues are inseparable from one another as well as indicating why these connected issues came about in the first place and where they can be orientated. In the coming years, we aim to move forward with clarity and intensity to more deeply connect with “commoners” from all around the world, and to reach out to those who might currently be indifferent to commoning practices even if, as we believe, they are already doing it. This, certainly through organizing activities whose chracteristics range from community to (cross-fields) collaboration, collectivity, institutional change, long-term relations (especially with artists), projects and development, critical discourse, art & activism, feminism, networks and complexity and through sharing in various forms of presentations and working together.