The exhibition "Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills 2022 Spring Collection" opens on the 28th of May at Casco, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills (TFM) was established by Casco Art Institute and The Outsiders in 2020 after our joint initiative to enliven and common a dysfunctional farmhouse in Utrecht’s Leidsche Rijn with multiple self-initiated activities of caring, learning and sharing. Once a vast, peripheral farmland providing food to the region, Leidsche Rijn is now occupied by housing blocks and over forty-thousand human inhabitants. Deprived of its surrounding farmland, the farmhouse reactivated by The Outsiders, Casco and many other neighbours and friends was eventually sold to a private developer and repurposed as a restaurant.  Yet our commoning journey has continued, in the same way one of our initial questions – ‘’do we know where our food comes from?’’ – remains ever more relevant. Departing from the farmhouse, Casco Art Institute and The Outsiders started travelling in the region and actively explored the agricultural past and present. We started connecting with old and new farming initiatives across Leidsche Rijn, creating the possibility to un/learn and share forgotten skills of living together with nature. The Museum architecture is a mobile vehicle that merges into its environment as it travels. It is a tangible repository for a growing collection of objects, knowledge, skills, and stories. Above all, it is a repository for the TFM’s relationships between farmers, citizens, artists and non-human beings. "Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills 2022 Spring Collection" is the first collection-exhibition of the museum held at Casco Art Institute. Here, we are metaphorically and literally spring cleaning – sorting out “things” stocked not only in the depot of TFM but also in the minds of many who were part of the journey of the museum. The exhibition “re-collects” what resources and relationships have been cultivated over two special years – coinciding with the pandemic – and shares these resources and relationships with a wider public.  The exhibition-collection presents cultural tools for resilient living in times of multifaceted crises with a focus on the commons, ecology, and heritage. Among the tools presented is a series of folding screens that function as a central weaver of re-collections. In East Asian cultural traditions, the folding screen often depicts nature and written literature. Serving multiple purposes, the folding screen may be used to exhibit, divide a room, or shelter against the wind. In the context of the TFM, the screen also re-presents what was seen and experienced in various farms or farm-related initiatives in the surroundings of Leidsche Rijn that the Museum travelled to – unfolding some of memory and stories from the journey.  The exhibition-collection also launches the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills’ regular tour program that runs through August. Visitors are cordially invited to join the tour to experience and learn from the Museum. These tours allow us to get in touch with a territory beyond the urban grid, where ecological ways of living together are practiced.

Saturday 16 October 2021, 14:00–17:00 (with party afterwards) Travelling Farm Museum depot (Winkelcentrum Leidsche Rijn Centrum, Hof van Bern 33, 3541 DD Utrecht) RSVP info below, free of charge Wheelchair accessible. No toilet present Agriculture is one of the most fundamental as well as contested fields of practice today. While the expanded industrialization has made it a principal cause of the climate crisis, there are many “forgotten” knowledges, skills, and stories in agriculture that have sustained the balance in the human-nature relationship. Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills began its tour in 2020 by visiting local agricultural initiatives in and around Utrecht’s Leidsche Rijn, a once vast, green, farm land. Despite the pandemic conditions, every week over late spring and summer, we took grounded tours, meeting and learning with an amazing list of incredibly knowledgeable and generous farmers. Now with the season of autumn returning, we organize a day of gathering to share the harvest of the Travelling Farm Museum and its special guests, to look back together at the labor and movement of the last seasons, and to get to know each other more with food, music, and perhaps dance! By doing so, we would also like to feel and envision together the near future of varying agricultural sites and the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills. Reservations are highly recommended for a safe and joyful gathering: please reserve via tfmdepot@gmail.com. We advise that you stay home if you have any Covid-19 symptoms. Please be kindly aware that you may need to show a valid QR code to enter. Children are welcome to join and play, also testing the “un-learning kit” for children at school and at home. Program 14:00 farmers’ market & exhibition (the door opens 15 min before) 15:00 collaborative food citizens game* 17:00 finger food & music (closing at 20:00) Please bring your own “harvest” from food to artworks and knowledge of the year to share! We also recommend you come by bike. If sunny, we may go and cycle together. * During the Oogstfeest farmers, neighbors, and food experts, including you, are invited to join the first session of the Food Game developed by Play the City. The game outlines a common and sustainable vision of how regional and healthy food could be organized in Utrecht West in the coming years. Your knowledge and experience during this game session is of great importance toward accelerating the transition to a more sustainable food system. – Documentation of the event by Chun Yao Lin: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8j811byznxk8f77/AACRgN02_mFKcdvSAhuH5lwla?dl=0

Saturday 16 October 2021, 14:00–17:00 (with party afterwards) Travelling Farm Museum depot (Winkelcentrum Leidsche Rijn Centrum, Hof van Bern 33, 3541 DD Utrecht) RSVP info below, free of charge Wheelchair accessible. No toilet present Agriculture is one of the most fundamental as well as contested fields of practice today. While the expanded industrialization has made it a principal cause of the climate crisis, there are many “forgotten” knowledges, skills, and stories in agriculture that have sustained the balance in the human-nature relationship. Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills began its tour in 2020 by visiting local agricultural initiatives in and around Utrecht’s Leidsche Rijn, a once vast, green, farm land. Despite the pandemic conditions, every week over late spring and summer, we took grounded tours, meeting and learning with an amazing list of incredibly knowledgeable and generous farmers. Now with the season of autumn returning, we organize a day of gathering to share the harvest of the Travelling Farm Museum and its special guests, to look back together at the labor and movement of the last seasons, and to get to know each other more with food, music, and perhaps dance! By doing so, we would also like to feel and envision together the near future of varying agricultural sites and the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills. Reservations are highly recommended for a safe and joyful gathering: please reserve via tfmdepot@gmail.com. We advise that you stay home if you have any Covid-19 symptoms. Please be kindly aware that you may need to show a valid QR code to enter. Children are welcome to join and play, also testing the “un-learning kit” for children at school and at home. Program 14:00 farmers’ market & exhibition (the door opens 15 min before) 15:00 collaborative food citizens game* 17:00 finger food & music (closing at 20:00) Please bring your own “harvest” from food to artworks and knowledge of the year to share! We also recommend you come by bike. If sunny, we may go and cycle together. * During the Oogstfeest farmers, neighbors, and food experts, including you, are invited to join the first session of the Food Game developed by Play the City. The game outlines a common and sustainable vision of how regional and healthy food could be organized in Utrecht West in the coming years. Your knowledge and experience during this game session is of great importance toward accelerating the transition to a more sustainable food system. – Documentation of the event by Chun Yao Lin: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8j811byznxk8f77/AACRgN02_mFKcdvSAhuH5lwla?dl=0

What enables a community to operate with minimal reliance on money? The Rojava Film Commune works for the production, distribution, and reception of films depicting and documenting the stateless society of Rojava, Kurdish and Arab culture, and the region’s continuing military and ideological struggles. The Rojava Film Commune is a collective of filmmakers founded in Rojava in 2015, it was created with the purpose of bringing cinema to the people of Rojava and further developing its democratic revolution. Rojava is more than a region located in the Northern and Eastern Syria. It is an autonomous government established in 2014 while surviving what’s often referred as the Syrian war ridden with geopolitical complication. It’s based on the radical democratic principle whereby key values such as cooperativism, diversity, women, ecology rule. The film commune is one of many communes that form the basis of Rojava governance. SOURCES: Roza The Country Of Two Rivers, a Documentary of Rojava Revolution by Rojava Film Commune: Rojava Film Festival CHANNELS You can watch a selection of the collective's works on their youtube channel here. You can follow Rojava Film Commune's communication channels here and here.

Collective Pot? Art of practicing the commons-based economy of resilience Online course Saturday 18 September 2021, 14:00-17:00 (CET) To get involved, please register here! Over the last decades, economic inequality and insecurity have only increased. There’s the financial capitalist economy as the key operator for this phenomenon. It abstracts value away from material worlds, use and sustainability, while simultaneously watering down the collective spirit. The field of art is not free from this systemic condition. One might say it has been functioning rather as an exemplary model of the capitalist economy through its emphasis on individual autonomy and its unregulated, fluctuating market values, disregarding materiality and labor in the process. However, there are also those who wish to change these cogs of the art world, taking back the economy with art at heart. These economic transformations are based on values relating to the commons, such as diversity, equity, pluralism, and sustainability, thus creating the conditions for a culture of resilience – one that resists, repairs and regenerates. Collective Pot? Art of practicing the commons-based economy of resilience is an online pilot course organized by Casco Art Institute within the framework of C4R. This course features artists, artistic collectives and other practitioners who will offer guidance to use and adapt relevant tools for a resilient economy. Currently we have assembled four tools for close workshops. We recommend this course to those who seek to liberate themselves from individual survivalism and sole dependency on money and its accumulation. Not only does this course focus on the use of the tools – it is also a forum to discuss and co-develop them together. Via Collective Pot?, we aim to support the participants, equip them with necessary skills as well as embody the culture of the commons in “concrete engagement” (Friction. A. Tsing, p. 267) with their lived cases. Please find more information on the course with the introduction to the tools and workshops, and how to get involved below. The working language of the course will be English and features captioning throughout. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- List of four tools and workshops The course consists of four workshops each of which focuses on a specific tool for the commons based economy of resilience with art at heart. The following are the teasers for each tool. More information on the tools, being updated over time, are available on the OpenTools section on the C4R digital platform. The platform is built on the resilient technological methods and takes on such mode of operation as set up and managed by one of the C4R partners, NetHood (Zurich). Rojava Film Commune by Rojava Film Commune, channeled by Sevinaz Evdike Rojava is more than a region located in the Northern and Eastern Syria. It is an autonomous government established in 2014 while surviving what’s often referred as the Syrian war ridden with geopolitical complication. It’s based on the radical democratic principle whereby key values such as cooperativism, diversity, women, ecology rule. The film commune is one of many communes that form the basis of Rojava governance. “Rojava aspires to a nonhierarchical and directly democratic system; its political structure is rooted in small, local assemblies in which decisions are discussed and agreed on collectively. Although private property has not been abolished, segments of agriculture and industry are cooperatively held. In this same spirit, the Rojava Film Commune was founded in 2015 as a collective dedicated to the production, distribution, and reception of films depicting and documenting the stateless society of Rojava, Kurdish and Arab culture, and the region’s continuing military and ideological struggles.” (from: https://www.artforum.com/print/202007/alan-gilbert-on-the-rojava-film-commune-83689 Especially Sevinaz Evdike, one of the Commune’s members will focus on what enables them to operate with minimal reliance on money, the importance of cultural, ideological and spiritual practices enabling their cooperative, autonomous models of governance. Art for Universal Basic Income by Institute of Radical Imagination, channeled by Mao Mollona, Marco Baravalle and Emanuele Braga** “While the art market confirms his status as a safe-haven assets provider for the financial elite, the current pandemic has highlighted the fragility and precarity of art workers around the world, a condition common to a growing portion of humanity. In this situation a UBI (Universal Basic Income) would then represent a solution and indeed an urgent measure to implement. But UBI is not “only” a response to poverty, it is a necessary condition in order to rethink our extractivist ecological model, to correct many race and gender asymmetries and, last but not least, to change the art world’s present neoliberal structure. UBI must be seen as a tool to open up new subjective spaces, alternative to the dominating entrepreneurial individualism and focused instead on commons and care” (from https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/the-school-of-mutation-2020/som-iterations/art-for-ubi/) Method of valuing the commons by atelier d’architecture autogérée R-Urban is a project run by atelier d'architecture autogérée based on networks of urban commons and collective hubs supporting civic resilience practices at the outskirts of Paris. Around 2015-6, one of the hubs was evicted from its site by the municipal administration that could not see the value of an “urban farm” compared to a parking lot. Prompted by this event, aaa took an initiative to account the value of resilient, ecological, citizen led initiatives. “Our value accounting gives visibility to what usually is invisible and uncounted—that is, voluntary unpaid labour, environmental care services, everyday ecological practices, and well-being improvements.This hidden value is normally appropriated by the state or the market for free (Bollier, 2016a, p. 30)” from the article “Calculating the value of the commons: Generating resilient urban futures” AAA, our partner for C4R experimented and will share with you an accounting method for the commons based activities which often defy known forms of transaction such as wage. This method is realized in collaboration with Katherin Gibson who’s a leading scholar in theorising and promoting “community economies”. Open Collective.com by Open Collective, channeled by Caroline Woolard & Pia Mancini Caroline Woolard, artist and one of our close interlocutors these days, recently joined the Open Collective Foundation as Director of Research & Partnership, and will guide you to the Open Collective tool together with one of the founders, Pia Mancini. “Open Collective Foundation is creating a legal, financial, and technical commons for the solidarity economy. OCF has a unique role to play as steward of a legal, financial, and technical commons—a piece of shared infrastructure—that is resonating deeply with the solidarity economy movement. We can build bridges between 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsorship, the open source community (where we have deep roots), mutual aid groups (100+ are hosted by OCF today), and the movement at large. A new clarity has emerged for Open Collective Foundation: Solidarity will be our guiding principle.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to get involved? We recommend you to get acquainted with each of the four tools before choosing one – for which you can attend a close workshop by the artists and art collectives offering the tool. Please also note the information and supportive documents for the tool continues to be updated on the C4R website. What enables a community to operate with minimal reliance on money? The Rojava Film Commune works for the production, distribution, and reception of films depicting and documenting the stateless society of Rojava, Kurdish and Arab culture, and the region’s continuing military and ideological struggles. How can artists organize against the increasing inequality amplified by the pandemic conditions globally? Art for Universal Basic Income – a campaign initiated by artists – is converging energies with movements across the world challenging the market’s current modes of exploitation. What shape can the infrastructure for the solidarity economy take? The Open Collective is working to build legal, financial, and technical tools which are open source and transparent – enabling connections between financial institutions, cooperatives, mutual aid groups and non-profit organizations. How is an evaluation method of a commons site created to counter the conventional value applied to it by governing bodies and decision makers? AAA builds on the ongoing tradition of the Community Economies framework and its iceberg iconography. By doing so, they offer a tool that can be adapted, re-applied and become an ally to groups, communities and commoners to visibilize what remains conveniently hidden or unaccounted for ‘in the eyes’ of the market and the government when decisions on such commons sites take place. Each workshop will take place simultaneously on the same date. There will be plenary sessions before and after the workshop to get further impressions on the other tools and relate to fellow participants. Find the detailed program below. Saturday, 18 September, 14:00 – 17:00 (CET) Online course Welcome and Introduction to the project and the online course 14:00 - 14:30 Four close workshops of the four tools 14:30 - 16:00 Plenary session and Q&A 16:00 - 17:00 Registration to the course is possible by filling this form. The registration and participation fee is suggested in sliding scales. Our intention is to accommodate 15 participants for each workshop, in order to allow the necessary interactions. The registration will be closed as we reach this capacity. Please contact Marianna Takou (marianna@casco.art) for any further inquiry.

What shape can the infrastructure for the solidarity economy take? The Open Collective is working to build legal, financial, and technical tools which are open source and transparent – enabling connections between financial institutions, cooperatives, mutual aid groups and non-profit organizations. Open Collective Foundation (OCF) is creating a legal, financial, and technical commons for the solidarity economy. Community is about trust and sharing. Open Collective lets you manage your finances so everyone can see where money comes from and where it goes. Collect and spend money transparently. OCF has a unique role to play as steward of a legal, financial, and technical commons—a piece of shared infrastructure—that is resonating deeply with the solidarity economy movement. We can build bridges between 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsorship, the open source community (where we have deep roots), mutual aid groups (100+ are hosted by OCF today), and the movement at large. A new clarity has emerged for Open Collective Foundation: Solidarity will be our guiding principle. Source: https://blog.opencollective.com/solidarity-as-our-guiding-principle/ RESOURCES You can find the Solidarity as Guiding Principle tool by the Open Collective Foundation here. Watch a brief presentation of the OCF:

How can artists organize against the increasing inequality amplified by the pandemic conditions globally? Art for Universal Basic Income – a campaign initiated by artists – is converging energies with movements across the world challenging the market’s current modes of exploitation. Art for Universal Basic Income by the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI). While the art market confirms his status as a safe-haven assets provider for the financial elite, the current pandemic has highlighted the fragility and precarity of art workers around the world, a condition common to a growing portion of humanity. In this situation a UBI (Universal Basic Income) would then represent a solution and indeed an urgent measure to implement. But UBI is not “only” a response to poverty, it is a necessary condition in order to rethink our extractivist ecological model, to correct many race and gender asymmetries and, last but not least, to change the art world’s present neoliberal structure. UBI must be seen as a tool to open up new subjective spaces, alternative to the dominating entrepreneurial individualism and focused instead on commons and care. If artists are already creating new collective economy models and alter-institutions, these small scale experiments will be much more valuable when connected with those growing social movements around the world fighting for a Universal Basic Income. The Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) is a think-tank consisting of curators, artists, and scholars, whose aim is to develop various forms of research intervention for the transition into post-capitalism. Together we want to explore and develop new practices and knowledge that contribute to the formation of new forms of life and its meanings as the practices of struggle for the commons. IRI is located at the threshold between Europe and the Mediterranean. The School of Mutation is IRI's pedagogical outlet, focused on the need to learn anew and re-make the world of culture in the unfolding of the biopolitical emergency brought on by Covid-19. Art For UBI is a campaign initiated in the framework of the School of Mutation. ART FOR UBI (MANIFESTO) 1/ Universal and Unconditional Basic Income is the best measure for the arts and cultural sector. Art workers claim a basic income, not for themselves, but for everyone. 2/ Do not call UBI any measures that do not equal a living wage: UBI has to be above the poverty threshold. To eliminate poverty, UBI must correspond to a region’s minimum wage. 3/ UBI frees up time, liberating us from the blackmail of precarious labor and from exploitative working conditions. 4/ UBI is given unconditionally and without caveats, regardless of social status, job performance, or ability. It goes against the meritocratic falsehoods that cover for class privilege. 5/ UBI is not a social safety net, nor is it welfare unemployment reform. It is the minimal recognition of the invisible labor that is essential to the reproduction of life, largely unacknowledged but essential, as society’s growing need for care proves. 6/ UBI states that waged labor is no longer the sole means for wealth redistribution. Time and time again, this model proves unsustainable.Wage is just another name for exploitation of workers, who always earn less than they give. 7/ Trans-feminist and decolonizing perspectives teach us to say NO to all the invisible and extractive modes of exploitation, especially within the precarious working conditions created by the art market. 8/ UBI affirms the right to intermittence, privacy and autonomy, the right to stay off-line and not to be available 24/7. 9/ UBI rejects the pyramid scheme of grants and of the nonprofit industrial complex, redistributing wealth equally and without unnecessary bureaucratic burdens. Bureaucracy is the vampire of art workers’ energies and time turning them into managers of themselves. 10/ By demanding UBI, art workers do not defend a guild or a category and depreciate the role that class and privilege play in current perceptions of art. UBI is universal because it is for everyone and makes creative agency available to everyone. 11/ Art’s health is directly connected to a healthy social fabric. To claim for UBI, being grounded in the ethics of mutual care, is art workers’ most powerful gesture of care towards society. 12/ Because UBI disrupts the logic of overproduction, it frees us from the current modes of capital production that are exploiting the planet. UBI is a cosmogenetic technique and a means to achieve climate justice. 13/ Where to find the money for the UBI? In and of itself UBI questions the actual tax systems in Europe and elsewhere. UBI empowers us to reimagine financial transactions, the extractivism of digital platforms, liquidity, and debt. No public service should be cut in order to finance UBI. 14/ UBI inspires many art collectives and communities to test various tools for more equal redistribution of resources and wealth. From self-managed mutual aid systems based on collettivising incomes, to solutions temporarily freeing cognitive workers from public and private constraints. We aim to join them. Source: https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/the-school-of-mutation-2020/som-iterations/art-for-ubi/ ART FOR UBI RESOURCES: * ART FOR UBI (MANIFESTO) | launching campaign * ART FOR UBI (Manifesto) #1 | Open online Assembly * ART FOR UBI (Manifesto) #2 | Open online Assembly * The paradoxes of gift economy and how basic income could save, change, abolish art making. A conversation with Dmitry Vilensky and Oxana Timofeeva

The Never-ending story of commoning a farmhouse in the lost farmlands. Looking back at Erfgoed (Agricultural Heritage and Land Use). Looking back at the stories of the project Erfgoed (Agricultural Heritage and Land Use). Erfgoed, a project by The Outsiders and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, was initiated to build a sustainable platform for ecological practices that conjure art, agriculture, and the commons in the area Leidsche Rijn, a sprawling new residential neighborhood in the Dutch city of Utrecht. You are welcome to visit the Collection of the stories of Erfgoed to find out more!

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons envisions better ways of living together through practicing art and the commons. Through co-exploration and study with collective art projects as well as organizational experiments, our projects grow from critical questions and radical imagination – forming community and together generating art and knowledge as common resources. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Do you believe that to transform yourself is to transform the world? Has cooking, singing, dancing, gardening, healing, dreaming, and making things with other people been part of your transformation? If so, you already know about art and the commons. The commons can be described as the natural and cultural resources held in common by a community. For example, community gardens, mutual aid networks, and open source software are all examples of the commons. The commons requires a collaborative process, which we call “commoning,” based on shared ethics and values such as diversity, equity, pluralism, and sustainability. Art is an imaginative way of doing and being, which connects, heals, opens, and moves people into the new social visions. Art is in fact inherent to the commons, as they are shared resources to keep the culture of community alive. In turn, the commons may well sustain art. With art and the commons we can draw a worldview beyond the divides of private and public, to shape together a new paradigm of living together as “we” desire - be it decolonial, post-capitalist, matriarchal, solidarity economies -- we name it! Art and the Commons are two key practices for Casco Art Institute. We see them as 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 a space of basic structure for change, for co-exploration and study with collaborative art projects as well as organizational experiments. We co-develop collaborative art projects out of critical questions and dreams. They are process-based and place specific, forming community and generating art and knowledge as common resources, together. Organizational experiments take place with all of these projects, including Casco Art Institute itself. We dream of offering an example of a commonly desirable institution of art and the commons that embodies diversity, equity, pluralism, and sustainability. All of the collaborative art projects and organizational processes we engage in are open to active participation from anyone who shares values around the commons and responsibility. Anyone with curiosity can experience multiple activities and publicly available common resources from the projects, in person, and in community with Casco. We especially welcome those who seek change in their life as well as in the world while feeling vulnerable alone or within other institutions. Since Casco Art Institute was born and has grown in Utrecht, we are committed to people and communities in Utrecht. We also engage with communities elsewhere, especially outside of western Europe, recognizing the world is intricately connected and the commons transcends national borders. Would you like to learn more about what Casco does? You are welcome to visit the website to find out more. REPRESENTATION