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The tapestry was crafted with phosphorescent and acrylic wools, allowing it to be ‘activated’ through exposure to light sources, particularly ultraviolet light sources.
Reflecting on this current moment of dreaming the future of NEOM and its developments, the work spans 840 cm in length, coinciding with the length of the facades of the earliest units at NEOM Community 1.
Photo by Giulia Bruno
Photo by Giulia Bruno
The work is produced using a hacked domestic knitting machine, a technology that was originally designed to produce fashion garments and was discontinued in the 1990s. Following some alterations to the primitive computational unit of the knitting machine, it was able to translate images into tapestry, a production process with glitches that bear witness to the relationship between vision and creation mediated through technology.
Photo by Giulia Bruno
Photo by Giulia Bruno
Photo by Giulia Bruno
A Blanket for Dreaming (2024)
Knitted tapestry (840 cm x 210cm )
NEOM, Saudi Arabia
A Blanket for Dreaming is a knitted tapestry that reflects on the imagination, vision and determination behind the establishment of new human settlements. The works presents a collection of urban plans of different communities that exist(ed) in the area of NEOM, a territory that is home to some of the earliest towns on Earth, and where the city of the future, The Line, is now being built; continuing this legacy of millenary urban innovation.
Arranged as the elevation of one of the units, the work offers a chronological timeline of the multiple visions that occupied this territory, from Bir Fuhayman’s Neolithic footprints to Rudayda Bada’s Iron Age legacies to the Nabatean traces of Aynuna and Malha Bada to more recent settlements such as Al Bada, or NC1.
The tapestry presents a sectional cut of the Arabian Peninsula looking South: from the Arabian Gulf and the conurbation of Khobar/Dhamman/Qatif, passing by the Yamama, Riyadh, Wadi Hanifa, mustatil structures, ancient battlegrounds and preserved himas, the Hejaz mountains, and the Red Sea.
Elaborating on the continuous human activities of navigating the earth through deciphering the cosmos, this new cartographic perspective emerges from the artists’ study of historic map-making traditions particular to the region such as The Table of Ga-Sur at Nuzi (3,800 BCE) all the way to the contemporary Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS).
The work displays the 28 constellations - 14 Yemeni and 14 Levantine- that people in the Peninsula use(d) to navigate time and space: from harvesting times, determining the arrival of spring, marking the seasons for migratory birds, or how to find particular geographic locations.
This experimental tapestry explores the metamorphosis of architecture and other human habitats through their corresponding relationship to what is sensed above it.
Sky Visions For Reading What Remains and Directions to Where We Are Going (2023)
Embroidered tapestry (900 cm x 200cm ) & UV installation
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Sky Visions for Reading What Remains and Directions to Where We Are Going is a transhistorical speculative tableau of cartographic practices combining ancient mythology, contemporary satellite geodata and social history. Composed as an eleven meter carto-textile collage, it proposes a playful constellation of archaeological, imagined and built traces charting the interrelationships between terrestrial and cosmic landscapes of the Arabian Peninsula.
A carto-historical narrative of the environmental transformations of the region as imagined by the vernacular mythology of the deity Alsaee.
Alsaee, meaning ‘striving’ or ‘manifesting’, explores how water has been conceived by cultures in the Arabian Peninsula throughout time as an ephemeral and emergent landscape, rather than fixed and flowing.
The book serves as companion to the cartographic tapestry, mixing reality and fiction, whilst forging a new myth around desalination plants and changing weather patterns in the Arabian Gulf.
Tapestry-map (180cm x 180cm) and accompanying publication - Commissioned by Margarida Mendes for CATHARSIS - The Porto Design Biennial
Porto, Portugal
Combining speculative hydrofiction, geological and archaeological evidence, different spiritual practices, land-based and indigenous materialities, The Deity of Alsaee heeds to the Arabian Peninsula’s local and industrial hydrology practices as indifferent to its mythology. The textile interacts and accompanies a visual guide and narrative report that contextualises the history of Alsaee through nonfictional and evidence-based information.
*work developed in collaboration with Ahmad Makia
The exterior of the building was covered with sandbags filled with sand excavated from the building as well as creating a thermal and acoustic barrier with the outside.
The interior presented a series of spaces
creating an installation that explored different timelines intersecting through material explorations and reinterpretations, recreating the marshlands that covered Dubai during the last ice age, the sand that was moved out with urbanization processes, to more recent remains like the ruins of the former buildings on the site.
the excavation of the building revealed the foundations of the previous structures that had existed in the space.
Materials from the building were reused and reinterpreted.
we were building sand castles_
but the wind blew them away_ FINALFINAL3.psd (2019)*
Installation - Commissioned by Alserkal Arts Foundation
Dubai, UAE
Reinterpreting the typology of a ruin folly in the context of Dubai and the 21st Century, we were building sand castles_but the wind blew them away_FINALFINAL3.psd alters the demolition process of an industrial site, revealing its previous functions and lives as a gallery space, restaurant and marble factory, as well as non-civilizational timelines, exploring remains prior to the urbanization of Dubai, up to the last ice age, as well as projecting thousands of years into the future.
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
Six strangers and a videographer are brought together through an anonymous open call selected by a jury
What to preserve, what to document, and what to let go are some of the reflections of the group, that insists on preserving their group culture beyond the performance.
During the week they develop a cathartic play to explore relationships within the group and the society they are trying to build
Performance, Video and Exhibition/Installation - Commissioned by Das Esszimmer and Videonale
Bonn, Germany
FOUNDATION brought together, through an anonymous open call, six ‘founders’ were selected to build the foundations of a new community.
Without leaving the gallery space for a week, or having any contact with the outside world during that period, these six strangers build bonds with each other while being documented by a videographer. They establish new rituals, build new spaces where they meet, create meta-human bonds, and discuss ways to preserve the legacy of their incipient inner-group culture.
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
Post-industrial shrinking cities often resulted from boom&bust extractive urbanism, closely linked to the exhaustion of local resources
Whereas the main outcome of The Degrowth Institute were multi-day workshops with local stakeholders, the project also crystallized in exhibitions, with a series of large-format tapestries made of printed paper and tape, producing different spaces within the exhibition space.
The Degrowth Institute (2015-2022)*
Series of Multi-Day Workshops - Produced with grants from Izolyatsia Foundation, EVZ Foundation, Migros Foundation, Zarya Art Centre, Alserkal Arts Foundation, German Ministry of Culture, and Ukrainian National Museum for Contemporary Art.
Donbas, Ukraine
The Degrowth Institute developed methodologies for horizontal planning in post-industrial shrinking cities in Eastern Ukraine.
Instead of fighting ebbing populations, The Degrowth Institute proposed to plan for degrowth. How would the city look like in 10 years, with 50,000 less people? What do we preserve? What do we let go? What do we do with the ruins? How do we rewild?
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
A large spiral tapestry was built as a space, containing a registry of the drawings left on the walls of these vacant towers.
Light would go through 60 % of the panels, leaving 40% opaque, coinciding with the number of vacant offices
A series of performative walks, mixing reality and fiction, through these vacant spaces with different stakeholders -from owners to tenants to bankers to realtors - were offered, culminating in a discussion around a pizza ‘office’ dinner
Installation & Performative Walk and Dinner
Dubai, UAE
Tower Fish Pigeon reflects on vacancy and the spaces it produces. 40% of office space was vacant in Dubai in the year 2019. This vacancy was artificially inflated by speculative portfolios that used these shells as money deposits.
Whilst erecting these towers, several drawings and traces were left on the walls of these vacant units by workers, designers, and passersby; creating a sort of 21st Century cavernous space.
The work reflects on the mass-scale vacancy of office towers in Dubai and their roles, the heritage and cultural shifts these spaces have generated, and their potential futures.
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
Participants in the multi-day workshops would be local community leaders, individual citizens and council representatives, who were paid for their contribution as experts
The Degrowth Manual is a free and easily downloadable publication that contains a series of exercises to complete individually or in a group to think of degrowth urban futures
Workshop Manual - Produced with grants from the Pistoletto Foundation, Migros Foundation, and Zarya Art Centre.
Kyiv, Ukraine
The Degrowth Manual is a self-guided easy-to-print open-source publication designed to ignite conversations around urban degrowth in post-industrial shrinking centers. The publication, bilingual (Russian and English) contained a series of exercises and passages that aimed to trigger conversations amongst the readers about the future of their cities.
For example, one of the exercises was a ‘Degrowth Tarot’ for forecasting non-growth futures, a custom-made deck that could be directly cut out from the publication.
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
Through an open call, five local participants were selected to participate as urban experts and design the new district. It included a residency in Athens, where they explored the city, and talked to different experts and residents.
After a research period in Athens, the participants returned to Slavutych, where they erected the first wall of the new district, a space for commons, sharing their learnings and ambitions.
The new district would not have an inhabitational function, but, rather, the group decided it would be an archeological park, where different items of the new town’s heritage would be buried for future archeologists to discover.
The journey and learnings were compiled in a publication published in Ukrainian, Greek, Russian and English.
Workshop, Installation and Publication
Athens, Greece and Slavutych, Ukraine
The city of Slavutych, Ukraine, was built in 1986 to rehouse the population of Pripyat, following the explosion of the fourth reactor of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The town was built in a record time of 18 months, each district being delegated to a different Soviet republic. Each republic rendered their utopian visions for this modernist city in a different district named after their own capitals, yet with strong connections to their own vernacular styles. What future awaits this modernist atomic city as it divorces itself from its nuclear past? What would it mean to build a new district today based on another city?
To answer these questions, we developed an artistic workshop that invited five participants to build a new district based on the city of Athens, Greece.
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU in collaboration with Teta Tsybulnyk
SWARM was presented as an app at a booth in a (mock) tech conference. A chamber changes colors depending on the inputs and ideas expressed by individual citizens.
Up to three participants can enter at a time to choose a process they would like participate and agree on
The opinions are computed and processed into chromatic sequences
Interactive Installation & video -Commissioned by Goethe Institute Beijing and Sonje Art Center - Seoul, Korea
SWARM suggests a new form of participatory planning mediated by a consensus-based voting system, where citizens can express their level of agreement with the suggested masterplan through a light spectrum.
By proposing an interactive game where participants have to express opinions and agree, without using words, but colors, on urban matters, we bring visibilization to spatial decision-making processes.
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
SELECTION OF VIDEOS
FOUNDATION (2019)
FOUNDATION (2019)
In February 2019, for one week, six strangers - the FOUNDERS -, selected through an anonymous open call, shared and inhabited the gallery of Das Esszimmer, in Bonn. They intended to set the foundations for a new society.
Without leaving the space, or communicating with the outside world, they explored the core building blocks for creating community, and how those social relations, and negotiations, were translated spatially.
Using affection as a mortar, new rituals were created, everyday routines were subverted, and new roles were performed during FOUNDATION.
Once the exposure to familiar social structures is minimized - cultural references, authority, consumer patterns, nation-state and family, among others -, how can we envision new ways of being together?
This is what was left, what was created, what was founded.
A project by METASITU
FOUNDERS: Eduardo Cassina, Grace Euna Kim, Dana Kosmina, Ellen H Tracy, Illia Yakovenko, Laura Yuile
Videography by Semih Korhan Güner
Commissioned by DAS ESSZIMMER, Raum für Kunst+
Supported by Kunst Stiftung Bonn Sparkasse and the City of Bonn
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
TDCU 1ZZ (2017)
TDCU 1ZZ (2017)
In January 2016, we joined another six artists, a Captain, and an expedition organizer to try to reach the World’s most remote human-inhabited place, the British Overseas territory of Tristan da Cunha.
This remote island community, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, can only be reached by sea from either the Brazilian or South African coasts, after approximately a week of sailing.
We never made it to the island.
TDCU IZZ documents and reflects on the failed expedition in the form of a deconstructed reality TV show. The work not only traces the events that led to the abortion of the whole expedition through our eyes, but also draws parallels with Tristan da Cunha, and by looking at the history of the settlement, shows how the world’s most remote enclave, is urban; part of the all-encompassing fabric of Ecumenopolis.
The departure point of our research project, which we intertwined with our lived experience on board, was the postcode for Tristan da Cunha – TDCU IZZ. In 2005 the island's governor wrote to the House of Lords for a colonial amendment to change Tristan's postcode to a more ‘UK sounding one’, to ease online shopping on eBay and Amazon. They wanted to be part of a global conversation. They changed their legislative landscape to be able to ‘perform urbanism’. Sorted in a dedicated warehouse in England, Tristanians receive their parcels every few months.
As the film highlights the connectivity of the island in the age of the Internet despite the geographical challenges that its remoteness poses, it also unfolds our increased isolation as a group of artists, removed from reality, on a boat to nowhere.
https://www.vdrome.org/metasitu/
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
72 TREES (2019)
72 TREES (2019)
72 Trees is a documentary film by Helena Doyle and myself about our journey around the world to win a piece of art. We took part in the Damien Hirst Spot Challenge where participants had to visit 11 Gagosian Galleries in 9 cities to win a Hirst print. We kept a blog during our trip.
This is a story about a transaction. Two ‘underemployed hipsters’ take on a challenge set by ‘the richest living artist’: visit all eleven galleries around the world showing his spot paintings while the exhibition is on, and win a print made by his assistants and signed by him. The two figured out a way to do the trip for less than what they would eventually be able to sell the print for, and turn a profit, or at least break even…if they manage to make it. 72 Trees explores the absurdity of markets, the people they meet on their journey, and the aftermath.
pwd: roundtheworld
https://mubi.com/en/no/films/72-trees
https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/sitdown-helena-doyle-eduardo-cassina/
TORA BORA (2015)
TORA BORA (2015)
Tora-Bora is the layer of dust left on skin and clothes when visiting the stone quarries in the West Bank. This research project looks at the stone industry in Palestine, in particular Jerusalem Stone quarries in the West Bank.
Different narratives unfold about the Jerusalem Stone when skipping through a variety of scales - from the atomic structure of the limestone towards geological time - millions and millions of years that are excavated every day and every night. Different scales mirror different perspectives. Jerusalem stone attracts the most diverse interpretations ranging from holiness, to its quality, to its timelessness to national identities written in the stone.
The work traces all the aspects of the stone industry processes from extracting the stone to cutting, exporting and its final destination, in this case, the Pentecostal Church of The Temple of Solomon, built in Sao Paulo with stone quarried near Hebron. The stone was able to enter Brazil bypassing the heavy import tax for construction materials as it was registered as a 'holy object'.
The project investigates the profanation of the land - a holy stone from the holy land - a brand whose formation is indigenous to the fetishization of the object and is claimed by every religion and ideology around the World.
A Film by METASITU
Voice: Shehrezade Al-Ayoubi
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
MEMENTO LOCI (2015)
MEMENTO LOCI (2015)
Memento Loci is a video piece that explores the notion of souvenir culture. The public spaces of touristic enclaves globally are dotted by interchangeable souvenirs, that far from reflecting on the peculiarities and characteristics of the place, turn them into a commodity of sorts.
By removing the memories of these lieux-de-memoire, today’s souvenirs have become medals of visits, the new version of the passport stamp among an increasingly mobile class. More than mere trinkets, their scale of production and distribution, allow for souvenirs to act as legitimizers of dominant spatial narratives, establishing a hierarchy of heritage, deeming certain elements of the built matrix as ‘bearers of social importance and significance’ (particularly to/for the visitor).
We find that this notion sustains the idea that through souvenirs, a relationship between the inhabitant or visitor of a given territory and its heritage is established, stressing, furthermore, the importance that these totemic objects have in the social construction and perception of these urban enclaves globally.
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
VOCABULARY FOR ECUMENOPOLIS (2014)
VOCABULARY FOR ECUMENOPOLIS (2014)
Vocabulary For Ecumenopolis is a video essay that introduces a new set of urban lexicon based on the idea of Ecumenopolis. This precept assumes that the whole world is urban, getting rid of urban/rural divides, and understanding the world as a whole in the era of globalization.
We identified a set of urban phenomena that we find unique in this new global city: situations and contexts that are transposed to other settings in this city of planetary dimensions, such as real estate bubbles, empty commercial properties, and privately owned public spaces among others.
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
THE VISIT (2014)
THE VISIT (2014)
The Visit conceptualizes the Lebanese mountain village of Meziara as a suburb of an invisible city, which owes its present shape to the remittances of villagers who migrated to Brazil, Benin, and Nigeria over the past century. It is precisely through this transnational set of networks that this urban specimen is configured.
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
#mariupolwillnotdie #itistheworldthatwillend (2015)
#mariupolwillnotdie #itistheworldthatwillend (2015)
Conceived and developed in the city of Mariupol and supported by Izolyatsia’s “Architecture Ukraine” program, in the Donbas/Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine, the project #mariupolwillnotdie #itistheworldthatwillend is a manifesto for the future urban development of the city. The performance in the video was used as an active tool for research and knowledge building, a catalyst to generate future scenarios.
The performance allowed us to embody the quest of the project, that of inverting the narratives around growth in the urban matrix, by literally reversing our movements in the post-edition. This subversion allowed us to exemplify the need for changing discourses, mindsets, and practices, attacking the expansionist-by-default neoliberal logic.
Whereas the urban population worldwide continues to grow, shrinking cities are ubiquitous. Mariupol, a city whose economy heavily relies on an industry that is increasingly being automatized, is no exception. Numerous shrinking cities across the world have embraced different policies for reducing their urban mass in recent years- “smart decline,” “strategic shrinkage.” Yet, we find that these strategies often hide intentions of growth instead of fully embracing the ebbing condition.
The main research questions were about subverting the understanding of growth, more specifically, in terms of master planning: What would happen if shrinking were to be embraced? How would it be planning for reduction instead of expansion?
We find that there needs to be a paradigm shift, one where cities accept their shrinking condition and actively plan for it. This can trigger multiple new opportunities that experiment with consensual decision-making processes, where the citizenry gets together to establish protocols for their collective future in a reduced built environment rather than following the master planning logic of zoning.
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
STOP OVER CITY (2014)
STOP OVER CITY (2014)
The film Stop Over City captures the future changes of Moscow International Business Center, aka Moscow City.
Set in 2041, this financial district has become part of Moscow’s International airport, the world’s first mega-airport: Sheremetyevo and Domodedovo have been connected by a high speed train, an 87 km long spine that beams through the city, stopping over at terminal SOC, Stop Over City (formerly known as Moscow City), a business hub that falls within the international transit area. A Free Trade Zone that facilitates customs and visa-free encounters with other global actors. A change of legislation that allows for this declining business core to be revitalized.
Stop Over City - a zone that is both a terminus and a carrefour, an end and a transition, a non-lieu and a lieu-de-mémoire. Stop Over City is a non-place that physically embodies that connection: landscapes that are repeated ad-infinitum holding individual stories.
*work developed as artistic duo METASITU
Contact - hola (at) eduardocassina.com
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