Eduardo Gimenez-Cassina Bergareche

Background and experience

Eduardo Cassina (he/them) - I am an urban planner and artist. My research explores the integration of artistic workshops in planning, particularly in the framework of artist residencies. I am working in the municipality of Giehtavuotna/Kvæfjord in Sápmi ( Troms - Northern Norway) developing an artist residency program that will bring perspectives and relevant insights that traditional planning methods often overlook.

My background is in architecture, heritage, and urban sociology. From 2014 until 2020, I co-directed METASITU, an urbanism practice based in Kyiv/Київ devoted to developing artistic research methodologies in urban contexts. We worked with participatory planning and urban degrowth in post-industrial shrinking cities throughout Ukraine with our main initiative, The Degrowth Institute.

In 2020 I relocated to Bangkok, where, until 2022, I was the Year 2 coordinator of the bachelor's program at INDA, the International Program for Design and Architecture at Chulalongkorn University. In Bangkok, I also co-ran a space for alternative spatial pedagogies, Monitor Lizard House (2020 and 2021), where we analyzed the urban effects of climate change in the plains of Samut Prakhan - จังหวัดสมุทรปราการ. 

I continue organizing artistic encounters and urbanism residencies - most recently in Slavutych/Chornobyl - Славутич/Чорнобиль (2021) and Encuentros Nave in Santiago (2021-2022); as well as participate in artist residencies myself (most recently, at NEOM-TBA21, 2024).

Most recently, I hosted TAR_trastad artist residency (summer 2025) in Giehtavuotna/Kvæfjord, in Sápmi (Troms), an artist residency that invited five practitioners to work with Trastad and its communities. 

I also led and organized Gieđa dievva ullut / En neve ull / A Handful of Wool, a community mapping tapestry developed in collaboration with Trastad Samlinger / Nasjonalt Senter for Outsider Art, and commissioned for the main exhibition of the 19th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2025), curated by Carlo Ratti. Made with former residents, retired staff, refugees, and local caretakers of the former institution of Trastad Gård, the work revisits the site’s layered history—of care, displacement, decolonization, and ecological collapse. Using wool and glow-in-the-dark yarn, participants mapped their memories and visions for the future of Trastad, reclaiming a place suspended between abandonment and reinvention.

My interests lie in establishing non-hierarchical symbiotic formats of knowledge exchange, developing intentional communities and other forms of human gatherings, spatial theory, and hosting durational gong baths.

www.eduardocassina.com