Emilio Koutsoftides is an architect and artist living and working in Paphos, CY. After studying architecture at the University for the Creative Arts – Canterbury School of Architecture he worked for firms in Cyprus and Malaysia and successfully participated in international competitions.

 

From 2016 to 2018, Emilio worked at Teecom, involving designing exhibition venues worldwide. He has worked for the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum, Miami at the M+ Museum, Hong Kong, the National Museum of Jordan, the American Natural History Museum, New York and for the EXPO 2020, Dubai.

 

In 2016 he won the first prize in the international competition Second Nature, a public art project titled Polycatoikia as part of the Paphos 2017 European Capital of Culture program. In 2017 he was commissioned to respond to the narrative of a moving performance called Spatial Counterpoints in the old city center of Paphos with the Frankfurt school of dance MA Code by proposing a series of sites and developing a lightweight sculptural object strategy to be used by the performers; the event was a 2 day show part of the Paphos 2017 ECoC.

 

He has taught on the Summer School at the University of Neapolis in Paphos, at the Foundation Course at the Cornaro Institute in Larnaca and at Canterbury School of Architecture.

 

Since 2016 he teaches on the Grampus Heritage Erasmus+ programme part of an exchange program with the University of Creative Art Fine Art Department for a one-month stay in Cyprus where he leads the ‘Walking Studio’ group in which they explore  new surrounding to develop narratives by creating conditions of the work and thoughts to react in environments other than the white space of a studio. The workshop opens opportunities for dialogues between the artist and the place or with the work and the landscape.

 

Through a collaborative environment, Emilio explores the intersection between architecture, art, performance, and activism in which, a cross-inspiration of thematic dialogues and methodologies allows for an engagement with cities, landscapes or in a more conventional way through gallery spaces.