With an Acre — An Afternoon with the CCA

Ella den Elzen is a curator and writer based in New York. She is a member of the curatorial team at Dia Art Foundation and previously held a curatorial role at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. A Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program from 2023 to 2024, she has published with Triple Canopy, C Magazine, and Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. She has also completed residencies at ISCP, New York, and Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany.

Francesco Garutti has been Associate Director, Programs at the CCA in Montreal since 2017. Using art, architecture, and moving image projects to activate critical and cross-disciplinary forms of research, Garutti investigates topics such as the rise of emotional capitalism, the relationship between technology and politics, and the role of institutions today. For the CCA, he has curated "The Things Around Us" (2021) and the research and exhibition project "Our Happy Life" (2019). He’s been directing the "Out of the Box" program on the Gordon Matta-Clark collection at CCA and the Amancio Williams Archive. His latest exhibition and film series Groundwork (2024–2025) has been presented at the CCA and in institutions and biennials worldwide such as the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2025 and the fifteenth Shanghai Biennale. He is co-editor of The Museum Is Not Enough n.10–14, published by CCA and Lenz in 2025.

Joshua Frank is a Montreal-born documentary filmmaker and musician. Raised in Beijing, Hong Kong, and New Delhi, he’s drawn to the intersection of cultures, seeking out the insightful, absurd, and unexpected juxtapositions of tradition and technology, hyperlocal and universal. As a director and cinematographer, Franks’s films focus on labor, migration, food culture, and architecture. He applies his background in small-footprint news and documentary shooting to share intimate, human stories, told with patience, high production value, and journalistic rigor. His work has been presented at film festivals including Hot Docs, DOXA, RIDM, and the Brooklyn Film Festival, and broadcast by HBO, Showtime, VICE, the New York Times, and CBC.

Nick Axel is Deputy Editor of e-flux Architecture and the Head of the Architectural Design department at Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He was recently Editor of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, and from 2020–2022, was Curator of Architecture and Chair of the Architectural Advisory Board at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Kyiv.

Lukas Brasiskis is Curator of Film & Video at e-flux; one of the three artistic directors of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2025); and cocurator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale (2023–24). He holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from NYU and writes and teaches about moving-image art.