Extra Academy: Seloua Luste Boulbina + Sammy Baloji

EXTRA ACADEMY

Extra Academy organizes an open program of lectures, performances, workshops and screenings around artistic practice, reflection and research. The platform that they offer, is one where participants become acquainted with practices and visions that are hardly or not at all addressed in the media or art education. In this way they aspire to create a much broader picture of the stratification and rich complexity of what contemporary artistic practice can mean in dialogue with, among other things, art-historical, socio-political, philosophical and economic implications.

SELOUA LUSTE BOULBINA

Seloua LUSTE BOULBINA is a philosopher and political scientist, currently a researcher (HDR) at LCSP (Paris Cité University). Former program director at the Collège International de Philosophie (2010-2016), she worked on the decolonization of knowledge. More generally, his work is centered on decolonization, in its political, intellectual, epistemic and artistic dimensions. She has published numerous works including Les Miroirs vagabonds ou la decolonization des savoirs (arts, literature, philosophy), les presses duréalis, 2018; Algiers-Tokyo, Emissaries of anti-colonialism in Asia, presses du real, 2022; Emerging from the Earth, A Philosophy of Plants, Jimsaan, 2024. She has written numerous texts on contemporary art. “Doris Salcedo’s Unsubmissive Hauntology”, Doris Salcedo, Fondation Beyeler, 2023; “MACTe: an anti-museum gripped by insularity? », Faire Monde(s), “Can art repair the world?”, January 2024.

SAMMY BALOJI

Sammy Baloji (1978) was born and raised in Lubumbashi, DRC, and lives and works between Brussels (Belgium) and his hometown. He studied computer and information science and communication at the University of Lubumbashi, and continued with photography and video at Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, in Strasbourg. A visual artist and a photographer, Baloji has been exploring the memory and history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work is a perpetual investigation into the cultural, architectural, and industrial heritage of the Katanga region, as well as an inquiry into the effects of Belgian colonization. His most recent solo shows include Sammy Baloji, Other Tales, Lund Konsthall and Aarhus Kunsthal (2020); Congo, Fragments d’une histoire, Le Point du Jour, Cherbourg (2019); A Blueprint for Toads and Snakes, Framer Framed, Amsterdam (2018); Urban Now: City Life in Congo, Sammy Baloji and Filip de Boeck, The Power Plant, Toronto, and WIELS, Brussels (2016-2017). Among other venues, his work has been shown in collective exhibitions such as the Fotofest Biennial 2020, Houston; the Palais de Tokyo, France (2020); the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial; the 22nd Sydney Biennale (2020); the Kassel/Athens documenta 14 (2017); The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2017); the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC (2017); the Venice Biennale (2015). A Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, Baloji has received numerous prizes and was a 2019-2020 resident at the French Academy of Rome-Villa Medicis. In 2008 Sammy Baloji co-founded the Biennale de Lubumbashi.