We are happy to announce some exciting new additions to our dream team of staff members.
Jorge Manilla will be the new main tutor of Alchimia’s first year MFA program, while Benjamin Lignel will be the new tutor in curating and creative writing for Alchimia’s second year MFA program.
Read below about their stunning professional experience. For more information Alchimia is at your disposal (easy: info@alchimia.it).
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Jorge Manilla is originally from Mexico but lives and works in Belgium.
Grown up in a family of goldsmiths and engravers, he studied visual arts at the Academy of San Carlos, in Mexico and received a higher technical jewellery training at the Academy of Craft and Design from the Mexican Institute of Fine Arts.
In 2003 he earned a Bachelor degree in sculpture at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and one year later he enrolled at St Lucas University College of Art and Design where he received a Master degree in Jewellery and Silversmithing in 2006.
Alongside his professional activities as an artist, he is right now working as researcher and doing his PhD under the title Other Bodies Design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He also teaches at different Art and Design universities around the world .
His work investigates his environment – religion, emotions, relationships and the meaning of life.
His dark forms and shapes create a barrier between the meanings of the objects and the outside world. Black implies self-control and discipline, independence and a strong will. It gives an impression of authority and power. To the artist black relates to something hidden, the secretive and the unknown, and as a result it creates an air of mystery. It keeps things bottled up inside, hidden from the world. For Manilla black is the end, but the end always implies a new beginning.
Benjamin Lignel is an artist, writer and curator. He is a co-founder of la garantie, association pour le bijou, a French association with a mission to study and promote jewellery. In this capacity, he co-curated “Also known as jewellery”, a exhibition of French contemporary jewellery that traveled seven cities, and helped program and organise the 44th Zimmerhof symposium (2012) in Germany as well as “Bijou(x). Les Pratiques contemporaine à l’épreuve de leur discours” (2014) a two-day symposium hosted by the Paris College of Art, in Paris. in 2014, he organised Différence et Répétition, a research-by-exhibition project that was shown in Norway and France. He became a member of Think Tank. A European Initiative for the Applied Arts, in 2009, and was appointed editor of Art Jewelry Forum in january 2013. He has just edited a third book under AJF’s imprint, dedicated to jewellery in the wider cultural realm, titled On and Off, and is currently working on a book on jewelry an gender with Namita Wiggers. Ben conducts workshops extensively on writing, curating and jewelry, and is a guest teacher at the Nürnberg Academy of Fine Arts since 2013.
