A year-long project exploring the possibilities for a domestic living space to become a site for investigating and exercising the social through an integral approach to art, design and theory.
Travis Meinolf, Berlin based artist holds a 15 day weaving session and workshop ‘Cottage Industry (Making Accommodations)’. A self proclaimed “action weaver”, Meinolf uses a weaving practice and it’s ensuing exchange process as a tool for conceiving an alternative economic model and the social relationship. For the GDR, Meinolf sets the apartment as a site for “a cottage industry” by building a collapsible full-size floor loom – next to the smaller handy looms – to produce rough cotton cloths that can be used as dishtowels, wash cloths and for all household needs. As yet, the intention is to initiate an alternative production model that generates a greater output than what is required for use in the household: rethinking and shifting the marginalized economic position of the domestic sphere. Participation in the weaving lesson is for free. For just observing or conversation, the door for “Cottage Industry” is open daily from 12.00-18.00. For the final presentation, please join Thursday Supper on 18 Feb. Read more >
A group of artists from the Dutch Art Institute have joined the GDR since last October and continued a private research seminar with guest artists, architects, curators/theorists. This month theorist Marina Vishmidt will hold a seminar focusing on the feminist perspectives on the domestic labour. Although it’s not open for the public, those who are extremely interested are welcome to join the evening session with a lecture & screening of a film by Helke Sander (From the Reports of Security Guards & Patrol Services No. 1, 5, & 8, Germany 1984, 11mins / 1986, 10mins / 1985, 6mins. 19.00-21.00). Please consult us. For the synopsis of the lecture, please click Read more >
Read-In is the collective effort led by Annette Krauss and Hilde Tuinstra to initiate instant reading sessions in someone else’s home. Finding a home to read is a joint undertaking in trying to comprehend a text and its possible homes. The number of the participants is limited. Please let us know in advance if you want to take part by contacting us at: (gdr@cascoprojects.org).
‘What’s Left’ is a long awaited book that in non-linear and experimental forms organizes research materials and speculative proposals relating to Bailey’s project for Casco in 2007 entitled ‘What’s left for its own devices (on reclamation)’. The book begins with the role of hydrological processes in creating specific spaces of sociability and private retreat. Through this lens, it cross-correlates the historic city of Utrecht and “Slab City”, an ad hoc squatters’ camp in the California desert. The mixed narratives of individual freedom and communal living associated with the latter find structural echoes in the wharves of Utrecht. These become thought stimulating resources for GDR activities. For the book launch event, Dave Hullfish Bailey who will also take part in the exhibition ‘For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there’ at De Appel, Amsterdam, will navigate the book together with the audience to revisit some of the findings. The book is co-published by Casco and Sternberg Press with the contribution by Lars Bang Larson, Emily Pethick, Jan Turmlir and Stuart Bailey (design). The book is available for purchase at the launch. Read more >
Graziela left for her home in San Paolo while Travis moved in the GDR apartment. Travis accompanied Grazi to help her to bring her suitcases to the Utrecht Centraal Station. On the house chalkboard is a keyword written after Graziel’s presentation in the last Thursday Supper: “Mutirao”, a Portugues word meaning “participatory mutual aids”. Accordingly, it becomes an additional topic/vocabulary for the GDR. The Korean equivalent words (Hyupdon, Pumasi) were added by Binna. Then, Travis jotted down the word “demiourgos” (or demiurge) which anticipates the activities during his stay. “Demiourgos” is an ancient Greek word for “public worker”… a tool for demiurge might be seen in one of the photos that shows the process of “making and storing string heddles to put on the loom“.
“Mutirao” is a Portuguese word meaning participatory mutual aid – for example when people get together to build a house. Projeto Mutirao, organized by San Paolo based artist and currently GDR host Graziela Kunsch, is an open-ended dialogical research process that exists solely in the form of conversations, lectures and classes. The starting point for these verbal exchanges are single take videos that investigate the ways in which self-organized cities are generated. These “A.N.T.I. cinema excerpts”, forming 70 collections thus far, are designed to kick start discussions. Kunsch varies her screening programme at each presentation to create different focuses for debate.
For Thursday Supper, a new GDR routine for generating discussion over home-cooked meals, Kunsch will screen A.N.T.I cinema excerpts on big land squats in Sao Paulo and on some projects by USINA – Project Centre for the Built Environment, an architecture collective that has been working with self-managed vertical housing for 20 years. This will initiate discussion with participants. Read more >
‘A Point of Origin’ is an interdisciplinary art action from students of the Hoogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht who presented a collection of works based on local spots of subjective interest in the city of Utrecht. This project was a result of the seminar ‘home is where the home is’, that dealt with visual languages and semiotics in the fields of fashion and design. Read more >
From the Library House introduction: Social Centres are self-managed spaces, a means whereby people can come together to create, conspire, communicate and offer a collective challenge against capitalism…
Social centres have always been a vital part of the infrastructure of radical social movements.
The Library House is one such place located in London, Brixton/Camberwell and is available to the community and political groups that need free space to meet, organise, put on events or workshops etc.
The Library House includes 3 rooms: a small one (coined as the”dining room”, for cosy meetings or small cafes) and two bigger rooms that can contain from 15 to 30 people each (one is the “cafe room” and has sofas+our free shop, the other one, just called the “front room”, is virtually empty to make it available for workshops like capoeira or theatre).
We meet as an open collective every Tuesday evening from 8pm to discuss use of the space and hear proposals.
The 1970 edition of the International Design Conference at Aspen was the occasion for an ideological collision between a youthful, environmentally focused subset of attendees, and members of the design elite who organized the conference. The design students and environmental activists who executed the protests created disturbances throughout the six-day event and then, in the conference’s summary session, read aloud and forced the conference to vote on a series of resolutions intended to improve the conference’s, and the design profession’s, engagement with social, political and specifically environmental issues. The fact that the multi-pronged internal critique leveled by these disparate groups led to a recalibration of the Aspen design conference’s content and structure – not just in 1971, which was the most emphatic embodiment of change, but also in subsequent conferences at least throughout the 1970s – makes this conference an interesting case study of a disruption to, and a paradigm shift in, established design practice and discourse.
(Copy deadline: 1 Nov 2010, to be published Jan 2011)
‘A woman’s work is never done’. Women’s work is often defined as repetitive, dull, endless and never-ending: even, as the opposite of “free” creative cultural labour of the artist. This volume will investigate how women’s labour appears as a subject in/of representation in contemporary women artists’ works and in its relation to women’s employment in the labour markets of the world (both legal and illegal work in factories, shops, service industries, agriculture, black markets and the sex industry). When women’s role in the paid labour market is dominant in the service industry and in many lowly paid, menial tasks – all essential for maintenance of the economy or environment – how can a feminist critique of labour or the feminist critique in art provide a means to question or challenge oppressive practices in paid work or the family. Women’s work – outside traditional employment or as a characteristic of it – is often defined as the small and insignificant chores which are needed to maintain, shop, clean and cook for a family. This has often been the subject of feminist art practices which take these essential tasks as a means to question the values attributed to waged labour. Defining the shifts of women’s work in a globalised economy – characterised by migration and exploitation – unites them in common frustrations about their “local” situation but how have feminist readings of art work about these subjects emerged in developed and developing economies in rapidly changing and often fragile economies. Read more >
The production of neighborhoods is always historically grounded and thus contextual.That is, neighborhoods are what they are because they are opposed to something else and derive from other, already produced neighborhoods … . [The] context-generative dimension of neighborhoods is an important matter because it provides the beginnings of a theoretical angle on the relationship between local and global realities. –ARJUN APPADURAI. Read more >
Born from the idea of creating a second life for the Shapes, Dimensions and Possibilities installation that had a binary existence at the Casco space, Two Part Door endeavors to satisfy the functional need for two spaces in the apartment. Read more >
In December of 2009 a group of Artez Editorial Design students from the Institute of Arts in Arnhem were guests and researched the history, social dimension and future of squatting highlighting issues of home ownership, sharing and community while questioning and expanding the role of editorial design. To conceptualize the concept of squatting culture in Utrecht, they used information from interviews, discussions and open floor debates amongst neighbours, squatters and anti squatters. Read more >
Excerpts from Stephen Willats, ‘Beyond the Plan: The Transformation of Personal Space in Housing’, 2001, Powell’s
The domestic interior ‘living space’ has become an important agent for our culture to symbolise its idealisations. It is the primary context for the ideological foundations of the dominant culture to be constantly stated to the individual and thus, ultimately, to the community. Read more >
Headquarters/apartment:
Bemuurde Weerd o.z. 18b
3514 AN Utrecht, NL Map
For a visit, ring the doorbell or drop by Casco to get the key! The apartment is open from Monday to Friday between 10.00–18.00 hrs. To arrange a visit at other times, please inquire at Casco in advance.
