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The text describes the process in which artist Anette Krauss worked together with Casco - Office for art, design and theory in Utrecht on unlearning habits and building new habits within the organization.

Theorist Andrea Phillips has captured the significance of this relation in the following question: “How does the front and the back of an institution operate together?” In other words, what is investigated in the unlearning session is the tension between the art institution’s vision that is enacted, visualized, and formulated in public discussions, exhibitions, publication, and community work and the way the institution is run on a management level.

What are our habits in running Casco and which “new habits” do we wish to develop in order to organize ourselves? And ultimately, how does collective research on unlearning not only foreground this tension, but foster the capacity to initiate certain shifts in the institution itself?

This brought the discussions and the research back to a very basic need within the institutional structures: how to allocate the time for reflecting on what we are doing, while simply not having it. The time problem sometimes resulted in staff members skipping a session to meet deadlines as the present reality of external pressures continued. We would joke about how the sessions at times felt like therapy sessions in those stressful times.

In one of the discussions we made the distinction between business with an “I” and busyness with a “Y”. Business, at its base activity for the sake of activity, is understood as a word to describe the economical structure under which we are living: a form of neoliberal capitalism and we saw busyness as the mental and emotional condition produced by the constant need to perform with the rhythm of business.

However, the constant external demand for productivity in terms of commodification, the absurdity of activity for the sake of activity, brings about this often unpleasant state of mind we keep talking about: busyness. Busyness is a state of mind, but at the same time the ideological stakeholder. We feel busy. We feel... under pressure, frustrated, nervous, disillusioned, afraid to fail, afraid to make mistakes or deliver bad quality work. We feel like we’re losing time by cooking food, cleaning the office floor, hosting guests, taking care of the plants, spending a day in a van to organize the storage space, and cleaning up other people’s cups. We feel like we’re losing time due to our headaches, sadnesses, and times in which we lack focus or concentration. It feels like losing time, because we feel like we have more important things to do—things we really have to do in order to economically sustain ourselves, such as fundraising and writing reports.

We realize that aside from the fact that we continue to undervalue a large part of our reproductive labor under the banner of “losing time”, such as domestic and maintenance work, another problem is that we are often forced to prioritize another type of work that could be considered business.

If we want to unlearn busyness, we need to unlearn devaluing reproductive labor. However, the reproductive labor that we do as a team is not undervalued necessarily by our team itself, invested as our practice is in feminist theory. It is something that is very much ingrained in us personally—structurally and socially ingrained.