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

The guest speakers are Andrea Viliani and Pierre Bal-Blanc.

The third edition of Extra Academy will be dedicated to the disparate curatorial practice of Pierre Bal-Blanc (director of CAC Brétigny) and Andrea Viliani (director of the Fondazione Galleria Civica-Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità di Trento).

Can one make works that are not of art? Can one make art that is not a work? Taking a cue from Marcel Duchamp, curator Pierre Bal-Blanc will reflect on de-creation – an ensemble of operations of eschewal and interrogation –, in relations to projects he curated such as Reversibility, The Living Currency, Death of the Audience and Draft Score for An Exhibition, realized at CAC Brétigny or at other contemporary art venues.

De-creation inquires into the separation between two constitutive moment in the existence of a work: the qualification of the creative process as a work of art, and its disqualification as a product or cultural fetish.

Andrea Viliani’s intervention at Extra City derives from a paper recently written on the occasion of a symposium at Banff International Curatorial Institute (Canada), and is divided into a prelude, an account of some (mis)adventures and a provisional happy ending.

Viliani will be describing the rise, in the contemporary museum context, of what he proposes to call “institutional narrative” (not the opposite of classic “institutional critique”, but a slightly different artistic and curatorial phenomenon). The contemporary museum context is much affected by this potential narrative approach, and is mutating in a ghostly fashion before our eyes, becoming more and more a “hypothetical” entity.

Language English