The Land School: 4Siblings & itacateca

Lees in het Nederlands

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.