Casa Río is an artistic, environmental advocacy and community-building organisation based in Argentina. Located at the mouth of the Río de la Plata estuary in the final stretch of the immense La Plata basin, Casa Río is a meeting place for training in creative practices with a commitment to the environment. The organisation consists of artists, lawyers, scientists, teachers, activists, a computer developer and a curator/cultural manager.
The primary aim of Casa Río is to foster stronger interactions between humans and their environment as well as biocultural forms of civic engagement. Specifically, the organisation seeks to respect and act on the co-evolution and co-dependence of human, plant and animal ecologies in the Paraguay-Paraná River Corridor, which is home to one of the world’s largest remaining wetlands. This wetland territory is conceived as a focal zone of inquiry for a comparative study of the ways in which agency, rights and responsibility are currently being reconceived from the bottom up, and in biocultural rather than strictly cultural terms.
Casa Río has developed a spectrum of artistic interventions and strategies for projects involving social and ecological justice, communication, community building and policy development. Their interest is to co-produce research and implement practices to promote joint development and new public policies that incorporate the ecosystem into national and international environmental policy frameworks. Casa Río encourages self-organisation and community involvement as a form of liberation towards actions that are profoundly connected to the environment and the life contained within it.
