binna choi

Workshop

Climate Justice Code for Artists and
Art Institutions
 — On the Making Through the Assembly and After

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons organizes the annual Assembly as an adaptable model in working together beyond one institutional roof or networked body. Opening itself up to examination, while attending to other (art) institutional practices, the annual Assembly at Casco Art Institute provides a regular moment for institutional reflection, collective agenda setting, and commoning experimentation—namely, for “commoning art institutions.” Built on the 2018 inaugural Assembly edition, “Elephants in the Room,” which focused on methods of unlearning, especially for the redistribution of power, the second edition (25-26 October 2019) with the title “Our House is on Fire” was dedicated to the collective drafting of a climate justice code for artists and art institutions. I will introduce how the assembly is organized and how this model of assembly has emerged and evolved through the pathways of our institutional practice with artists and other practitioners, lending it to make a space for exercising the collective action in the last Assembly.

Binna Choi is a curator, and the Director of the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in which she, together with her team, re-established in 2018 under its current name and modus operandi after a 10-year trajectory within the institution. During this time, she conceived the long-term, art-driven transdisciplinary project, “Grand Domestic Revolution” (2009–2013) and the artistic research program, “Composing the Commons” (2013–2016). The latter includes a collaborative project between artist Annette Krauss and the Casco Team Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) and the Arts Collaboratory, a trans-local ecosystem that practices art in an expanded sense of inventing new ways of living and working together. Currently, she is working on a project focusing on the Gwangju Democratic Uprising (aka 5·18) and, together with You Mi, the exhibition on Eurasia both as a relevant geopolitical and geopoetical space for imagining the commons, both set to unfold in 2020. Choi has been a faculty member at the Dutch Art Institute, and a member of Akademie der Kunst der Welt as well as the Community Economies Research Network.