Casco Casco - Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht
Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht is an experimental platform where art invites a new vision of society. Art and the Commons are two key practices for Casco; both tools and visions for better ways of living together. Casco Art Institute works for this vision of art and the commons by creating a space, or ‘Casco’, meaning in Dutch an empty space or basic structure for change, for co-exploration and study with collective art projects as well as organizational experiments.
Casco co-develops collective art projects out of critical questions and radical imagination. They are process-based and place-specific, forming community and together generating art and knowledge as common resources. Organizational experiments take place with all of these projects, including Casco Art Institute itself. Casco dreams of offering an example of a commonly desirable institution of art and the commons that embodies diversity, equity, pluralism, and sustainability. All of the collective art projects and organizational processes Casco engages in are open to active participation from anyone who shares values around the commons and responsibility.
Casco was founded in 1990 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, as a platform for experimental art. Since 1996, Casco has developed a critical programme that explores art in the public realm, questioning the relation between art and its physical, social and political environment. Central to Casco’s approach has been openness and flexibility towards programming, with projects taking multiple forms; be this in public space, a publication, a discussion, a workshop, exhibition, symposium or event. Since 1996 Casco has also sporadically published its own magazine, Casco Issues. In 2005 Casco took the new title of ‘office for art, design and theory’ in order to set a wider agenda towards an interdisciplinary practice that not only seeks to address these areas independently, but to venture into their cross-fertilizations, shared concepts, critical discourses, and their connections to other fields. Central to our investigation into these fields are the relationships between theory and practice. Casco maintains a questioning approach to culture, which is also applied to its own position in the cultural field. Besides pursuing different modes of artistic production, Casco seeks to open its own infrastructure up to experimentation in order to push the position of a visual arts organisation, both in the fields of art and design, and in wider social, cultural and political frameworks.