With an Acre — An Afternoon with the CCA

Join the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) as it returns to e-flux Screening Room on Saturday, November 7, at 3pm, with an afternoon of film and conversation featuring a screening of With an Acre, the third chapter in the Groundwork series conceived and produced by the CCA. The series follows the conceptual development and field research of architects exploring alternative modes of practice in an age of ecological crisis.

The film will be introduced by Joshua Frank, film director of the Groundwork series, and will be followed by a conversation with e-flux Curator of Film and Video Lukas Brasiskis, e-flux Architecture Deputy Editor Nick Axel, CCA Associate Director, Programs Francesco Garutti, and curator and writer Ella den Elzen, exploring the use of film as a tool for curatorial research.

The CCA is an international research institution and museum founded in 1979 on the conviction that architecture is a public concern. In the past decade, the CCA has expanded into film as a format to investigate the forces shaping our environment, and how architecture may shape society in turn.

Film

(2025, 45 minutes)
The film follows architect Carla Juaçaba as she develops a museum and community space in solidarity with a collective of smallholder farmers in Minas Gerais, Brazil, resisting extractive industrial agriculture. Inspired by the form of highway billboards that mark the extended rural landscape in the region, Juaçaba proposes a landmark on an elevated plantation overlooking the town of Nepomuceno.

Biographies
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.

For more information, contact [email protected].

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator that leads into the e-flux office space. The entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Avenue (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.