“Who that has ever visited the borders of this classic sea, has not felt at the first sight of its waters a glow of reverent rapture akin to devotion, and an instinctive sensation of thanksgiving at being permitted to stand before these hallowed waves?”

Edward Forbes

The Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC) in 2023 — as part of “Students as Researchers: Creative Practice and University Education” a Collateral Event organized by the New York Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Design, approved by Leslie Lokko, curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 — is hosting Giulio De Mitri as artist in residence from January to December 2023. The artist, one of a group of 12 (of which six are from Italy and six from Singapore) is working on a mobile exploration of the crisis of water. The curatorial project conceived by Lanfranco Aceti will be a long term investigation in the elemental crisis of water, earth, wind, and fire. The artists will explore, according to their own personal aesthetic approaches and cultural underpinnings, the elemental crisis of water, its impact, and the consequences of the alterations of its mythologies and poetics. The curatorial brief titled, What If This Were The Case: The Waters We Are In, is inspired by the meaning of case: building up a case and case as a means of transportation. The international sharing of knowledge, understanding, and interpretations of the current crisis are paramount to resuscitate old mythologies and cultural postulates — or to develop new ones — truly inspired by communal structures of surviving, living, and possibly thriving.

Over forty years of active presence in the visual arts characterize the artistic research of Giulio De Mitri. He gives his work an ever-new value, full of stimuli and meanings: a cosmogonic repertoire crossed by mythical and sacred visions. He is a rigorous artist and a refined intellectual with multiple cultural interests. In his long and challenging artistic journey, De Mitri’s works of art are rooted in deep ethical and aesthetic reflections. They stand upon a philosophical matrix based on Platonic and Heraclitean thought linked to the social and linguistic issues of the twentieth century. With his works of art — the expression of an artist among the most significant of his generation — he evokes great existential themes.
De Mitri sees the Mediterranean as the extraordinary universe that links the threads of human history, the cradle of civilization and culture, from West to East, North to South, and vice versa: a miracle that welcomes and distributes creativity and beauty. “The Mediterranean, a magical territory, open to all diversity,” says De Mitri “is an Eden where passion and reason, nature and history, meet and lose their boundaries and merge into a body and soul; perfect osmosis capable of generating and determining new life. A new and fruitful vision Meridiana, for a culture of dialogue, for a plural richness.”
Committed to the history and imagination of Mediterranean culture, De Mitri is present in prestigious national and international exhibitions (Budapest, Stockholm, Osaka, Samothrace Island, Ajdovscina, Porto Alegre, Philadelphia, Sarajevo, Berlin). These include the XV Quadriennale di Roma; LII and LIV Biennali di Venezia (J. Beuys. Difesa della natura; Sguardo contemporaneo; Padiglione Italia); Biennale del Fin del Mundo 2014/2015, Mar del Plata, Argentina; I Biennale Arte & Industria. Utopia and Reality, Labin, Croatia; Enviromental Art Festival Lakonia: arthumanature topos 2007, Sparta and Geraki (Greece). In 2016 he was awarded the 57th Premio Campigna.