FRICTIONS Administrative workshop at Casco Art Institute Caption: FRICTIONS administrative workshop at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, 10–11 September 2025, Photo credit: Chun Yao Lin FRICTIONS Administrative workshop at Casco Art Institute: Day 1, Order of Events. Photo credit: FRICTIONS 10 -11 September 2025, ACElab researcher Kate Rich convened a two day workshop at Casco Art Institute – Working for the Commons in Utrecht (NL), as part of her MSCA Fellowship research FRICTIONS. The workshop brought together Casco staff and board members with allies and peers working in arts administration and cultural organising across the Netherlands. The event formed part of Casco’s exploration into practical modes of organising and maintaining (arts) spaces in resistance to capitalist economic logics – in particular, what it would take to transition Casco from an arts institution “working for the commons” to becoming a commons itself. A central concern in FRICTIONS is establishing protocols to do administrative research in and with living organisations, where the need to know can be balanced with the need for opacity. The first day of the workshop was focused on testing and iterating a set of careful technologies for sharing the kinds of intimate administrative knowledge that do not normally circulate outside a single organisational (or an individual administrative practice). The second day took the form of a speculative scenario, set seven years into the future, in which Casco had evolved into a fully functioning commons. Within this imagined context, we explored the roles, rules, relations, economies, administrative modes and organisational forms that might arise. The objective was to emerge back into the present with some practical, tangible, even homeopathic actions, in the form of routines or technologies for institutional change to apply here and now, in our administrative lives. FRICTIONS Administrative workshop at Casco Art Institute. The Administrators’ Do-Si-Do tackles the conundrum of how sensitive administrative know-how might be shared, Photo credit: Chun Yao Lin photography. FRICTIONS Administrative workshop at Casco Art Institute. Experimenting with a diverse economies 4D budget. Photo credit: FRICTIONS. PrintFriendly
