Creative Europe
Desk UK
for Culture

COHAB is a collaborative project devised by three visual arts organisations – Casco, Utrecht, The Showroom, London and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, each of which are small in scale and located in residential areas on the periphery of major European city centres. The project aims to investigate meaningful ways in which artists (and organisations) can be deeply invested within their local contexts and at the same time form close dialogues on an international arena.
The project is comprised of a series of four ‘keynote’ artists’ productions; a local ‘action research’ project led by each organisation, involving artists projects that will be developed with the participation of communities who share the concerns of the project; and a series of six knowledge-exchange meetings with Cluster – a network of similarly scaled and located organisations across Europe – with whom the processes and outcomes of our work will be shared. Through this we aim to stimulate different modes of creative thinking, methods of transnational collaboration and knowledge-exchange that will traverse between the local and global.
Drawing on areas of commonality – our ‘situatedness’, the similar roles that we play within our local and international communities, and our shared theoretical concerns – the project COHAB will link our work together more closely to explore themes that are highly relevant to each of us: questions of locality, community and ‘the commons’ in relation to forms of social and economic organisation, and more broadly, questions of cohabitation both on a local and European level. We will involve artists in addressing these questions with us on a conceptual level, and apply this research through the lenses of their practices.
Through COHAB we will develop fresh models of how to work together as arts organisations.