Free entrance

English spoken

Bless is a fashion/design studio created in 1997 by Ines Kaag, based in Berlin, and Desiree Heiss in Paris.

The two designers escape from any calibrated definition of fashion, faithful to their initial concept, dividing and combining creation, between fashion, art, design and architecture, they engage an independent work method, which often implements collaborations and interactions with friends, customers and other contributors.

Their creations are born from true personal needs; aiming for simplicity and comfort throughout daily life while aspiring for more visionary horizons. Their products as well as their distribution systems do not fit into any pre-established category; Bless passes without transition from one area to another, from highly functional forms to conceptual propositions on the verge of abstraction. An unlimited, fluid and contemporary conception.

About Extra Academy:

‘Extra Academy’ is the spontaneous alliance of Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen and the two art schools of the city, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Sint-Lucas Antwerpen. It involves close collaboration with a network of guests and students.

‘Extra Academy’ is a structural service ‘in progress’, offering different tools and trajectories as a supplement to – or disturbance of – academic models and reflexes. Its open program of lectures, performances, workshops, exhibitions and screenings is designed to trigger alternative questions about modes of knowledge production, of research and practice. It probes gaps and unexpected solutions, teasing out the point where ideas materialise, where they are confronted with their palpable consequences. It believes that theory is not an allegory of practice.

‘Extra Academy’ listens, looks, asks and wonders. It collects and distributes conversations, it inquires about the educational turn in the arts and about the turn that will dislodge it, while providing time and space for a plasticity of ideas to manifest themselves.

Language English