Eduardo Cassina is an artist and urban planner working in Giehtavuotna/Kvæfjord, Sápmi (Northern Norway). Eduardo's practice is shaped by his background in architecture and urban sociology, investigating themes of territorial representation, experimental cartography, and participatory planning. 

Eduardo holds degrees from the Glasgow School of Art, the Amsterdam School of the Arts, Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Goldsmiths, University of London.

In 2014, Eduardo, alongside Liva Dudareva, co-founded the urbanism collective METASITU, which has been exhibited internationally at institutions including commissions for Mystetskyi Arsenal- National Center for Contemporary Art (Kyiv),  Alserkal Arts Foundation (Dubai), and Songe Art Center (Seoul).  

Eduardo’s recent works explore the co-creation of territorial representations as devices to be integrated in planning processes.  His latest work, Gieda Dievva Ullut / A Handful of Wool, a collective textile cartography made by workers and residents of Trastad Gård, formerly one of Norway’s largest residential facilities for people with special needs, has been selected by Carlo Ratti for the main exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.

Longer bio:

Eduardo Cassina (he/they) is an urban planner, artist and residency organizer.

Following their graduation from the Mahindra United World College of India, they studied architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. Upon completing their studies in 2008, they enrolled at the Earth Institute in Auroville to deepen their knowledge of traditional earth-based building techniques. They then occupied different research and design roles at the Guggenheim Museums in Venice and New York, as well as the Netherlands Architecture Institute (now Het Nieuwe Instituut) in Rotterdam. 

They went on to study Urban Heritage and Museology at the Reinwardt Academy -Amsterdam School of the Arts- which was followed by a one-year fellowship at Tsinghua University where they researched the spatial impact of tourism in heritage villages around Beijing. They continued their education at Goldsmiths, in London, where they obtained a Masters in Brand Development and Urban Sociology followed by a Master’s of Research in Media and Communications focusing on Architecture, where they researched bottom-up spatial manifestations of Sino-African exchanges in Southern Africa. 

In 2013, they joined the urbanism research program at the Strelka Institute, where they would later (2015-2016) lecture and mentor on extractivism and para-national infrastructures. Between 2014 and 2020, they co-directed METASITU, an urbanism practice based in Kyiv, centered around participatory planning and urban degrowth in post-industrial shrinking cities throughout Ukraine. With their main initiative, The Degrowth Institute, they organized immersive themed residencies around ideas of ruinification, rewilding, and recalibrating relationships towards industrial waste landscapes.

In 2020, they relocated to Bangkok, where they were a design instructor and the Year 2 Coordinator at INDA, Chulalongkorn University until 2022. In Bangkok, they co-founded Monitor Lizard House, a project space where they researched the impact of climate change, shrimp farming, and mangrove reintroduction in the salt plains of Samut Prakhan. 

Currently, they are a Ph.D. Research Fellow in Experimental Urban Planning, in the Department of Global Development and Planning, at the University of Agder, in Norway. They are working in the municipality of Giehtavuotna-Kvæfjord in Sápmi (Troms- Northern Norway), developing an artist residency program for socially engaged practitioners to develop works that bring forward insights about the former institution of Trastad Gård.