Extra Academy is a spontaneous alliance of Extra City, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Sint-Lucas Antwerpen.

The guest speakers of 5 April are Yona Friedman, Nico Dockx, Maurizio Bortolotti and Ergin Cavusoglu.

#1a

Screening of a film by Yona Friedman, 'Overview + Subtitles', followed by a conversation between Nico Dockx and Maurizio Bortolotti.

#1b

Ergin Cavusoglu introduces and screens his film 'Backbench', commissioned by Manifesta 8.

Biographies:

Yona Friedman (b. 1923) is a French architect of Hungarian birth. He studied architecture at the Technical University in Budapest, but he left Hungary in 1945, and completed his training in 1948 at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. In 1956 he attended CIAM X in Dubrovnik, which confirmed his belief that requirements generated by technological progress and demographic growth were too great to be solved by traditional social, urban and architectural values and structures. In 1957 he settled in Paris and founded the Groupe d’Etude d’Architecture Mobile (GEAM) with Paul Maymont, Frei Otto, Eckard Schultze-Fielitz, Werner Runhau and D. G. Emmerich. The group’s manifesto was Friedman’s 'L’Architecture mobile' (1958), in which he rejected the idea of a static city. Friedman’s ambition was ‘to help the inhabitant to become master of his own design’ – the sub-title of the manifesto. Applications of his participatory concepts were used in a project for the CDC headquarters in Ivry-sur-Seine (1976) and the Lycée David d’Angers (1978–80). His exhibition 'Une Utopie réalisée' drew a record attendance at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1975. In 1981 he began to work with Eda Schaur on a museum where techniques and methods for self-reliance would be demonstrated to disadvantaged people, resulting in the Museum of Basic Technology in Madras, India.

Nico Dockx (b. 1974) lives and works in Antwerp. He works out of a fundamental preoccupation with archives and structural processes such as data, memories, information, distribution and management. Often outcome of collaboration with other artists, his installations, publications, soundscapes, texts and videos investigate the relationship between perception and remembrance, allowing multiple interpretations to emerge. Nico Dockx has been awarded with a DAAD grant in 2005 and showed in 'Utopia Station' (50th Venice Bienial/ Haus der Künst, Munich), 'Monopolis' (Witte de With, Rotterdam), 'Through Time & Today' (Musée des Beaux Arts de Nantes), 'daybyday & another day’ (le centre d'art de l'île de Vassivière), and 'CRYPTICCRYSTALCLOUD' (CCA, Kitakyushu).

Maurizio Bortolotti (b. 1961) is an Italian art critic and curator. He is professor and member of the scientific committee of the Department of Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA in Milan, and is a regular contributor to the international magazine of art and architecture Domus. Recent shows curated by Bortolotti include: 'Modelmania', with Olafur Eliasson, Kjetil Thorsen, Yona Friedman (Venice, 2005) and Yona Friedman: A Project for Mart (MART, Rovereto, 2006). He has lectured in many places, amongst the others: the Domus Academy in Milan, the Goldsmiths College in London and the Shanghai Art Biennale in Shanghai. His work is focusing especially on the contextualization of art and architecture into the urban space and its relationships.

Ergin Cavusoglu (b. 1968) was born in Bulgaria as part of the Turkish minority. He studied Fine Arts at The National School of Fine Arts 'Iliya Petrov' in Sofia in the early 1980s and subsequently received a BA in mural painting from the University of Marmara, Istanbul, and an MA from Goldsmiths, London, where he has been living and working since. In 2003 he represented Turkey at the 50th Venice Biennale and was included in the 8th Istanbul Biennial. Cavusoglu is known for his lyrical and unsettling both mono and multi screen video installations that reframe our sense of our surroundings, and posit questions about our contemporary production of place in a globalised society marked by mobility. By capturing a rhythm of illumination and movement, using light to define space and darkness to evoke the unknown, both individually, through editing, and collectively, through the juxtaposition of screens, his works poetically restructure our sense of space, and of reality.

Language English