Extra Academy: Vincent Meessen
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.
Origins and becomings of the Poïpoï
The “Poïpoï” is a cornerstone of Robert Filliou’s poetics, running through his entire oeuvre. The title of his first co-produced multiple (1961), structuring his first published text in 1963 (in the Belgian magazine Phantomas), and a script of an early dialogic performance, the Poïpoï resurfaces at regular intervals as a “poietic dynamic” and a foundation of his concept of permanent creation. Visited by prototypes of the Poïpoïdrome, center of permanent creation, as early as 1964 (Verviers), and again in 1975 (Brussels), Belgium was very early exposed to this life adventure begun with the architect Joachim Pfeufer in 1963.
Vincent Meessen will revisit the historical and transcultural origins of Poïpoï and, in particular, its African component linked to the Dogon people (Mali).
But beyond its connection with the field of anthropology, its poetic resonances and its links with TEAM 10 in modern architecture, the Poïpoï was also an opportunity for Filiou and Pfeufer to develop an open, generative and potential art form: the poïpoïdrome, which they presented as an "eminently realizable building".
