history

Cascoland at Oerol festival

In the summer of 2004, ëCascolandí was initiated at the Oerol-festival on the island of Terschelling, the Netherlands, bringing together a group of 5 artists that were all researching DIY-architecture, but from different backgrounds. We erected a ëCascolandí village in 3 weeks prior to the festival and kept developing it during the festival through audience-participation. íCascolandí was open all day to be visited, workshops were given, and at night turned into a vibrant little village where people could eat and drink and enjoy music and theatre and actually take an outdoor bath in our 5-story bath-tower. So in the middle of the theatre-festival, which Oerol is, we did a project involving architecture, sculpture, theatre and had people actually stay for bed and breakfast in our objects.

Now we plan to take ëCascolandí to South Africa, where DIY-architecture is day-to-day common reality for a large part of the population. DIY-architecture can be found everywhere in South Africa (and Africa), driven by the exigencies of an impoverished migrant population of work-seekers. Setting up ëCascolandí in the SA-context, we are creating a different and much more complex feeding-ground for our research than we previously did in The Netherlands. And at the same time we are adressing issues and problems that are very real and not to be found in the Netherlands at that scale and magnitude.