4Siblings x itacateca: The Land School

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons presents its Autumn 2026 artistic program, The Land School, an exhibition and evolving collaboration between two collectives, the Amsterdam-based 4Siblings and Mexico City-based itacateca. Their shared engagement with land as pedagogy towards ecological regeneration and collective making forms the project's conceptual core.

4Siblings develops site-specific, land-based practices at the intersection of ecological thinking, pedagogy, and experimental forms of public art. Their work emerges through direct engagement with soil, plants, and local contexts as active collaborators, responding to questions of environmental decline, access to land, and the shifting conditions of contemporary artistic production. They create temporary gardens and outdoor interventions that reflect nomadic, adaptive modes of cultivation and collective practice. Today, 4Siblings' edible labyrinth, inspired by milpa cultivation in which diverse crops and companion plants grow interdependently, is situated at Buurtwerkplaats Noorderhof in Amsterdam Nieuw-West.

itacateca is a translocal collective and network cultivated since 2022 through Arts Collaboratory, specifically the AC School at documenta fifteen, and in relation to the lumbung ecosystem. They safeguard communal and ecological memory through collective artistic production, archival practice, and peer-to-peer circulation. Conceived as part of the vital and diverse webs that sustain our multispecies communities, their practice creates and preserves self-narrated practical knowledge at the intersection of food, time, and territory, fostering reciprocity and translocal solidarity.

Rooted in previous encounters and ongoing exchange, the collaboration grows through a residency by 4Siblings in Mexico preceding the Autumn program. Beginning with a visit to San Gregorio Atlapulco, a pueblo in the borough of Xochimilco, south of Mexico City, where itacateca's practice is rooted, the collective learns from the chinampa, an ancestral agroecological system of Mesoamerican origin that remains in cultivation today. More than an agricultural technique, the chinampa is a living infrastructure bringing together land, water, plants, animals, microorganisms, and human communities in a system that cultivates food while regenerating conditions that sustain life.

From there, the residency continues through the landscapes of Oaxaca, tracing the histories of maize and ancestral cultivation methods. Along the way, the collectives exchange stories, seeds, and artistic methodologies while co-creating new works, which return to Casco to shape the exhibition.

The exhibition unfolds through two interrelated spatial registers. Newly commissioned installations by 4Siblings and itacateca are presented separately on the exhibition floor. In between them is a lively harvest room, where the practices of both collectives converge and enter into conversation. Functioning as a space for ongoing gathering throughout the exhibition period, it houses a communal table for making and conversation, a growing reference library for study, and a tent offering a place to rest and reconnect.

The Land School extends through public activities with an expanding ecosystem of interlocutors, including The Outsiders, Myvillages, Leštnice, While Kitchen-ing, and Seasonal Neighbours, alongside students from the HKU Master of Fine Art, and many others. Building on relationships cultivated through the earlier Land-ing in Relation program, which convened 4Siblings, itacateca, and these interlocutors, these activities ground the exhibition within Utrecht and its surrounding agri-cultural landscapes, providing the local foundation from which the translocal exchange in Mexico unfolds.

Through workshops, skill-sharing sessions, children's activities, cooking, collective walks, and visits to agricultural sites, the Autumn program invites the public into an ongoing process of learning with the land. The knowledge, materials, and relationships generated during these encounters are continuously harvested back into the exhibition through drawings, risograph prints and zines, embroidery, sounds, seeds, produce, and other traces of collective practice.

The Land School is part of a four-year trajectory that reaffirms Casco's ongoing commitment to ecological unlearning and the commons.