Binna Choi & Marianna Takou (Casco Art Institute)

Binna Choi is the director at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in Utrecht, where she engages with both its artistic program and the organizational and (de)instituting process, as her curatorial and collaborative art practice. In doing so, the commons are both an end goal in systemic change and a methodology, by which she means equal, just, and sustainable modes of caring and sharing common resources counter to privatization and extractivism. “Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills” with the Outsiders, “Site for Unlearning (Art Organization)” with Annette Krauss and the Casco team, and “COMMONS.ART” with Yin Aiwen are some of her recent or ongoing curatorial works, next to the process of restructuring and rearticulating the institution itself with the Casco team, the ecosystem and the annual Assembly (since 2018). There, she earlier conceived the long-term transdisciplinary project “Grand Domestic Revolution” (2010-2012) and the multifaceted program “Composing the Commons” (2013-2016). In 2018, Choi also co-initiated “Unmapping Eurasia”, a long-term movement-based curatorial project with You Mi. Arts Collaboratory translocal art organizational ecosystem and Dutch Art Institute Roaming Academy is where she has been involved for years with different capacities. Moreover, Choi is a member of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Cologne), where in 2020, in close collaboration with Christian Nyampeta, she curated "Gwangju Lessons" over the 18 May Democratic Uprising and took it to Asia Culture Center as part of the “MaytoDay” project by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. In 2016, she was a curator for the 11th Gwangju Biennale. She has also been serving as an advisor to the AFIELD network and a board member of the Green Art Lab Alliance (GALA)'s legal support body.

Marianna Takou is a researcher and organizer from Αthens, Greece. She is currently based in Utrecht, where she works as a producer, organizer and researcher at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. She first became part of the ecosystem of Casco as a volunteer in 2013. Since 2019, as part of the team, she has been working on different aspects of Casco’s operations and is a member of the Arts Collaboratory network. With a background in Sociology and training in International Development, she holds an MSc in Sustainable Development. Her research interests and organizing focus on feminist and queer practices in mobility, migration, the commons, and the degrowth movement. She is a founding member of niet normaal*, a queer collective active in Utrecht, and a member of Read-in, a collective that experiments with collective reading and memorizing. She is also a member of the Climate Justice Code working group.