House Museum for Gerrit Rietveld Academie – bricks to build homes for careful archives
Ying Que, Marianna Takou

Prelude to House Museum for Gerrit Rietveld Academie – bricks to build homes for careful archives by guest curator Nina bell F.
Nina bell F. (pronouns she/they) is a spirit and living organism fermenting in and around Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in Utrecht. Their existence is built on emerging relations with kindred souls from the past and present. Nina bell F. House Museum is an instituting practice for keeping Nina’s spirit alive, developed from a critical reflection on Casco’s archival practices and its political economy. The collection proposes useful ways of being and knowing–communally and economically in terms of organizing and fermentation, in which the selection process followed an intention to develop kinship. It was launched for Natasha, the Singapore Biennale 2022-2023.

Wan Ing Que, or Ying, is an anarchist anthropologist, educator, and cultural worker whose work draws from curatorial and artistic research. She was part of the Casco team as project and community organiser from 2012 - 2016 and one of those who named Nina bell F. As a freelancer she remains close to Casco as a member of the Assembly steering committee and through project-based work. She is a guide for the Traces of Slavery walks in Utrecht. Her work is affiliated with social movements and cultural activism, ranging from writing and programming to radio and theatre works. She is concerned with pedagogy, feminism and anti-colonialism, approaching these from a range of topics, including the commons and commoning practice, food autonomy, and cycles of colonial and postcolonial violence. Since summer 2020 she is taking care of the community space Moira Exporiment in Utrecht. Among her other collective involvement are the Starlings, the Disobedient Art School, niet normaal* and Read-in.

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.