“To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.”

William Shakespeare

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 presenting Lanfranco Aceti’s curatorial statement. The curator, who developed the basis for the international exhibition titled What If This Were The Case? – The Waters We Are In, is working on an aesthetic exploration of the crisis of water. The curatorial project conceived by Aceti will be a long-term investigation into the elemental crisis of water, earth, wind, and fire. The chosen 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 legal case as well as a case as a means of transportation. The international sharing of knowledge, understanding, and interpretations of the current crises are paramount to resuscitate old mythologies and cultural postulates — or to develop new ones — truly inspired by communal structures of surviving, living, and possibly even thriving.

Lanfranco Aceti is an artist, a curator, and a scholar. Currently, he is curating What If This Were the Case? – The Waters We Are In for the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale. He produces as a curator or as an artist installations, projects in public space, performances, and exhibitions on issues such as social justice, postdemocracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance, and matriarchal social hypotheses.

As a curator Aceti worked as director of Kasa Gallery in Istanbul, where he exhibited a range of innovative artworks including 75Watts by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, acquired by MoMA, and Paolo Cirio’s Loophole4All, awarded the 2014 Golden Nica at Ars Electronica. He curated The Small Infinite at the John Hansard Gallery with artworks never previously exhibited from the estate of John Latham. He has curated numerous artists’ participations in art fairs such as Art Athina, Art International, Supermarket, and Contemporary Istanbul. In 2011, he curated the exhibition Uncontainable as part of the parallel events of the 12th Istanbul Biennial and exhibited international artworks on the media facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. In 2016 he curated a range of artworks as part of THE SOCIAL at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Boston Athenaeum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other public spaces in Boston and London. In 2017 he curated a new public performance by Stefanos Tsivopoulos, One Step Forward Two Steps Back, on the White House sidewalk in collaboration with the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University and Ad Nauseam a public intervention for documenta14. He is also working on the first staging of empty pr(oe)mises, a project initially conceived for the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, and documenta14.

“Water is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” my little sister said as a child looking into the dark mirror-like reflections of water in a well.

For the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021, I explored in many of my works of art a natural spring and the rivulets and brooks that once formed a river. But I was also intrigued by old farm wells, which served small communities and families, and found them either filled up, abandoned, or transformed. Systems that filter and pump the water directly into the taps of the homes replace the surviving and still functioning wells, sealed and no longer freely accessible. The little strips of common land where the wells stood have also been privatized either de facto or through contracts.

In most cases, the untouched wells that stood the test of time were abandoned or had fallen into disrepair. The large majority had turned into ruins. The wells collapsed onto themselves or were filled with dirt, waste, and dead animals. At times local corrupt politicians and mafias used them to dispose of radioactive waste and hazardous chemical compounds. They knew the water would filter into the springs and aquifers. Nobody cared if people fell sick and died as long as money flowed.

Toxic waste was buried in the fields at night, dropped somewhere in between hills and creeks, within old mines, into lakes, and springs. Toxic waste was buried whenever possible and as quickly as possible.

The water I saw — and keep on seeing — is no longer the fresh cold water of a spring or a well. I remember the metal bucket plunged into the dark depths of the well. The whiffs of cold air coming up from its depth offered a temporary but welcome respite from the scorching heat of the day. The beautiful shades of green of ferns and mosses would cover the stones that formed the circular walls of the well and offered a respite to the eye against the blinding light of the day. All those green colors invited me to look down towards the deepest and most obscure parts of the well.

The bucket would break the blackness with a splash. The echoing sound would travel back up while the water would offer a spectacle of shimmering ripples. Then, the bucket would sink and fill with water. One would have to pull it up slowly so as to not lose its content. It was an art to learn how to evenly distribute strength with each pull-up so that the bucket would not capsize, dropping all the water back in the well. The bucket was cold and covered in droplets of water. It was shiny as if covered with shimmering little diamonds. The glass would go in, and one would drink the water, naturally filtered by the sedimented sands at the bottom of the well. 

Now to drink that water is considered folly. The water is not potable, even though people drank it for centuries. Suddenly, at some point, it was no longer safe. And no one single person could be blamed.

While public water was slowly phased out, we became accustomed to plastic bottles. They were supposed to deliver safe water as an alternative to tap water badly managed by dysfunctional public companies and with a sour taste of chlorine. Until we discovered that the plastic of the bottles was releasing noxious substances into the water. When that realization arose it was too late, plastic was everywhere. In the form of microplastic or nanoplastic. It was in the tap water and the bottled water. It is in the Himalayas. [1] We returned to glass bottles with the hope of better water. The problem is that there is no possibility to bring water back to its primordial elemental state. The water we drink is contaminated by corporate processes upon which there is little to no public oversight.

This is the landscape of the life-giving element that is water, with stories that have reached public consciousness like the Flint water scandal, [2] the dumping of Fukushima’s radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, [3] and the agricultural pollution of lakes in New Zealand with the dying out of fishes and birds. [4] 

Water is a silent killer. It is the conduit for multiple poisons to sediment in the body. Sadly, it is now something from which we have to defend ourselves. The poetics of water, its mythological role, and its cultural components have also been degraded with the unforeseeable consequences of a necessary reshaping of contemporary aesthetics and cultural attitudes.

The aesthetic demands are not disjointed by socio-political demands. They are multifaceted aspects of a conflict in which the reprogramming of our collective understanding of resources will favor or deny access. It is access and participation that characterize democracies. What will happen when part of the population — like in Flint, Michigan — no longer has access to basic services? What is the role of the state as a guarantor of equal access? Can a state that has privatized all public services and basic resources still be a democracy?

Through ownership and capitalistic exploitation of resources it is how we have been programmed to understand reality. We exist now outside the remits of collective support and survival, and live to consume. It is in this context that art’s role is fundamental to display, enforce, and exhibit its own modus operandi, favoring communal forms of engagement.

I have always liked artworks that challenge the notion of ownership more than the notion of authorship. There are multiple reasons, the main one being that the artwork becomes unsellable and is a communal expression. The aesthetic challenge to authorship is often more of a posture than a reality. The artist is still present — firmly entrenched as the initiator, instigator, or agent; ready to be recognized and acknowledged as ‘the artist’ who has conceded privileges.

The impossibility of selling the work of art removes the pressure of performing in accordance with capitalistic mores and transfers a latere — in a different communal space of engagement — the work of art, freeing it from the financial exploitation of artistic labor, alien aesthetic notions, and the censorship of personal perspectives.

Personal freedoms (as forms of manifestation of personal perspectives) are fundamental when redesigning the processes by which to share resources, to reimagine the mythological hyper-iconicity of human existence, and to remap the poetical cardinal points of the world.

Family, memories, and imagined alternative worlds offer respite from commercial works of art produced solely and principally for sales and gains. Commercially driven art exists in a world of aesthetic restrictions that have little to do with artistic sublimation and all with the abject value of the object of art.

Commercial artists [5] are obliged to respond to alien and alienating descriptions of what the work of art should look like, how it should feel, why it should exist, and how it should behave. The aesthetic remits are programmed by others who have very little understanding of art or appreciation for its sociohistorical context. 

I have never taken well to such restrictions. This intolerance — a psychological allergy, I would define it, to anything that is ‘incorporated’, castrated, or neutralized — is more accentuated in my artistic practice. I am an artist that wants to do what he wants to do and as a curator, I like to provide the space for artists to do what they want to do. [6]

I find it rewarding to curate works of art that challenge pre-established aesthetic notions, well knowing the complexities and difficulties that the artists and their works of art will have to contend with. 

When tensions arise and the shifting grounds of sociopolitical mobilities alter the very core of social existence across the globe, art cannot and should not be a whimper. Art cannot afford to be just that because while some people attempt to continue to enforce a world of exploitation of resources for the advantage of few and the detriment of many, the seeds of future dystopia are sowed today. 

The Planters (1932 – 1933), a painting by Adamantios Diamantis, part of an installation I did in Cyprus, insistently resurfaces in my memories. It reminds me of the back-breaking job of planting a seed in dark times, without certainty and with little hope that it might germinate and lead to better times of plenty. The colonial context and the revolutionary charge of the painting are displayed in the gestures of the peasant women and in the light at the center of the painting which shows the promise of hope for a possible brighter future. While Diamantis was part of a dark present with the hope of a better future, we currently exist in the light of a ‘fabulous’ present with dark clouds on the horizon and waning hopes. 

While commissioning artists for the production of new works of art for the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, the questions for the reasons and the value of producing art are louder than ever. They signal the importance for art to speak for those who have no voice, either because they have been rendered powerless or are not considered worthy of political consideration.

These are the waters that we are in. Then, who should art speak to? I believe it should speak to our families and friends, those in our communities who understand as well as those who don’t, urging them to prepare for a world in which the water will be dark. Art has the onus to allow the existence of different aesthetics and to say things differently. It has the opportunity to develop in the collective consciousness the understanding that the murky waters we are in are not a temporary fluke.

It is time for art to speak and to not be gentle about what it says. It doesn’t matter from what perspective: if from a poetical and mythological analysis, from a family-centered anthropological standpoint, using the abstraction and the dissolution of forms, via subtle conceptual musings, or through memories of bygone times. 

Whatever the artists I selected for the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale will say, I have only asked them, when I commissioned and curated this exhibition, to roar with all of their strength and to not go gently into the night.

Endnotes

[1] Neelavannan, K., Sen, I. S., Lone, A. M., & Gopinath, K. (2021). Microplastics in the high-altitude Himalayas: Assessment of microplastic contamination in freshwater lake sediments, Northwest Himalaya (India). Chemosphere, 290, 133354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.133354 Also: Kopatz, V., Wen, K., Kovács, T., Keimowitz, A. S., Pichler, V., Widder, J., Vethaak, A. D., Hollóczki, O., & Kenner, L. (2023). Micro- and Nanoplastics Breach the Blood–Brain Barrier (BBB): Biomolecular Corona’s Role Revealed. Nanomaterials, 13(8), 1404. https://doi.org/10.3390/nano13081404 

[2] Carrera, J. S., & Key, K. (2021). Troubling heroes: Reframing the environmental justice contributions of the Flint water crisis. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, 8(4). https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1524 Also: Mohai, P. (2018). Environmental Justice and the Flint Water Crisis. Michigan Sociological Review, 32, 1–41. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26528595 

[3] Zhao, C., Wang, G., Zhang, M., Wang, G., Bezhenar, R., Maderich, V., Xia, C., Zhao, B., Jung, K. H., Periáñez, R., Akhir, M. F., Sangmanee, C., & Qiao, F. (2021). Transport and dispersion of tritium from the radioactive water of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 169, 112515. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2021.112515 Also: Lu, Y., Jingjing, Y., Du, D., Sun, B., & Yi, X. (2021). Monitoring long-term ecological impacts from release of Fukushima radiation water into ocean. Geography and Sustainability, 2(2), 95–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geosus.2021.04.002 

[4] Joy, M. (2015). Polluted Inheritance: New Zealand’s Freshwater Crisis. Bridget Williams Books. Also: ABC News. (2021, March 17). Behind New Zealand’s clean, green image is a dirty truth. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-16/new-zealand-rivers-pollution-100-per-cent-pure/13236174 and McClure, T. (2023, March 26). ‘Like you’re in a horror movie’: pollution leaves New Zealand wetlands irreversibly damaged. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/25/like-youre-in-a-horror-movie-pollution-leaves-new-zealand-wetlands-irreversibly-damaged 

[5] Alberro, A., & Stimson, B. (2009). Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings. MIT Press. https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB00827117 Also: Chiapello, E. (2004). Evolution and co‐optation. Third Text, 18(6), 585–594. https://doi.org/10.1080/0952882042000284998 

[6] “I’ve realised that the curator’s role is more that of enabler. The Italian conceptual artist Boetti told me to pay attention to artists’ unrealised projects. Many artists have not been able to realise their fondest projects. My role is to help them.” Obrist, H. U., Jeffries, S., & Groves, N. (2022, October 19). Hans Ulrich Obrist: the art of curation. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/23/hans-ulrich-obrist-art-curator 

“The south is so amazing. Just talked to an old man by the river about micro plastics and he said ‘There’s glitter in our veins that will long outlast our bones’ then he just walked away from me.” Tweeted by Hayley J. Clark, @hayleyjclark

Where are we? The waters we navigate are choppy, transformed by the socio-political conditions of our contemporary existence.

As hope fades and we ready ourselves for new political conflicts, water crises, and epochal changes, the water crashing against my feet on the beach of Sentosa in Singapore carries sounds of relaxation and memories of mythological existences. But these memories are now polluted by waters that I know have moved across the oceans and the skies for decades now, accruing lethal combinations of chemicals and nanoplastics. Looking at the water that laps my feet on the sand brings shudders for the invisible dangers of the cancerous substances in it. Water is now a silent killer as well as a source of life. My days at the beach of Gaeta in Italy are no longer relaxing and joyous but spent — every time my three-year-old nephew swims — scrutinizing the water for the scum that the waves bring in. Trying to sound carefree and as little stressed as possible, I encourage him to move somewhere else with the excuse that ‘there’ the waves are bigger, shinier, and stronger.

Water also carries memories of polluted bodies. It infiltrates our homes, bringing diseases that cripple the body, ravage our children’s future, and silently kill us over time. It does not matter if it is tap water or bottled water. The existential condition of water has drastically changed. There are no longer crystalline waters. Even when I reach an isolated and secluded spring in the Apennines in Italy, the destruction that post-postmodernity brings — all due to unchecked greedy ‘progress’ to benefit a few and damage the many — speaks to me of abject political failure. The polis is no longer here.

We, as a species, have failed. The water of the future that we will have to wade through is becoming ever more treacherous by the day. The belief that public trust can still exist in this day and age is risible. 

“Residents should use bottled water or filtered and boiled water for cooking, drinking, making ice, brushing teeth, washing dishes, rinsing foods, and mixing powdered infant formula. When using tap water, bring cold filtered water to a boil, let it boil for one minute, and let it cool before using. Boiling kills bacteria and other organisms in the water.” [1]

And so, what is water now? What is the water in our bodies?

“Soon after the city began supplying residents with Flint River water in April 2014, residents started complaining that the water from their taps looked, smelled, and tasted foul. Despite protests by residents lugging jugs of discolored water, officials maintained that the water was safe. […] As Hanna-Attisha noted, ‘Lead is one of the most damning things you can do to a child in their entire life-course trajectory.’ In Flint, nearly 9,000 children were supplied lead-contaminated water for 18 months.” [2]

Governmental failure in the name of greed and corruption is not limited to or endemic to the United States. The ideology of capitalistic greed is eroding thousands-year-old collective ways of living across the planet. Here in Venice and the surrounding region of Veneto no one can be sure of the status of water. Is it safe to drink? The presence of PFAs with their untold consequences — common knowledge since 2007 [3]  — is an unresolvable problem. Nevertheless, state bureaucracy — through unethical if not illegal practices — continues to hide, cover, and disguise. It tries to limit the ‘damage’ to areas that are named red zones. As if lines drawn on a map can contain the fluidity of water, alter its course, or even stop its flow. [4]

The aesthetic curating of water becomes a challenge that is not just human and collective but ultimately elemental. Individuals alone cannot solve the devastating and continuing pollution of water. The structures of collectivism and collective actions have been actively opposed and dismantled to favor pseudo-protests for the sake of self-promotion and the appearance of a social engagement that is not only misdirected but also ineffectual.

The aesthetic wrestling of contemporary artists with the pollution and alteration of water and its meanings is a monumental battle. It is a duel that a curator can only admire. This very process of memorializing the life-giving strength of water, its mythical and poetical roots, and its deathly alteration and destruction is what makes the individuals selected for this exhibition exceptional artists.

[1]  O’Neill, C. (2023, February 13). Feb. 2023 water main break updates – City of Flint. City of Flint. https://www.cityofflint.com/feb-23-water-main-break/#:~:text=The%20boil%20filtered%20water%20advisory,were%20negative%20for%20Bac%2DT. 

[2]   Denchak, M. (2018, November 8). Flint Water Crisis: Everything You Need to Know. NRDC.  https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-you-need-know#summary 

[3]  Rubin, A. (2018, March 22). Che cosa sono i PFAS? 5 cose da sapere per capire di che cosa parlano giornali e tg. Focus.it. https://www.focus.it/ambiente/ecologia/acqua-e-inquinamento-che-cosa-sono-i-pfas

[4] Macauley, D. (2010). Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas. State University of New York Press. 

“After the Barrage, the Deluge includes an interview I conducted with the investigative journalist Omar Radi in Casablanca in January 2020 – just a few months before he was arrested by Morocco’s authorities and sentenced to six years in prison. According to a 129-page report by Human Rights Watch, Radi’s sentence ‘appears to be politically motivated’ and based ‘on unfair judicial proceedings’. The report describes how Moroccan authorities have created an ‘ecosystem of repression’ to stifle free speech and scare off critics, using practices that increasingly target journalists and dissidents such as Omar Radi with false charges.”

Oliver Ressler

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 Oliver Ressler as artist in residence from January to December 2023. The artist is one of a group of 12 international artists presenting a mobile exploration of the crisis of water. The curatorial project conceived by Lanfranco Aceti will be a long-term investigation into 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 legal case as well as a case being a piece of luggage. The international sharing of knowledge, understanding, and interpretations of the current crises are paramount to resuscitate old mythologies and cultural postulates — or to develop new ones — truly inspired by communal structures of surviving, living, and possibly even thriving.

Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives. 

Ressler has had 90 solo exhibitions, including at Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; The Cube Project Space, Taipei; Kunsthaus Graz, Graz and comprehensive solo exhibitions at Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville; SALT Galata, Istanbul; and MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest. 

Ressler has participated in more than 400 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the biennials in Prague (2005), Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Gyumri (2012), Venice (2013), Athens (2013, 2015), Quebec (2014), Jeju (2017), Kyiv (2017), Gothenburg (2019) and Stavanger (2019), and at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 (exhibition organized by EMST).

Ressler has completed forty-two films that have been screened at thousands of events including social movements, art institutions, and film festivals. In 2002, Ressler won the first prize at the International Media Art Award of the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016.

For the Taipei Biennial 2008, Ressler curated an exhibition on the counter-globalization movement, A World Where Many Worlds Fit. A travelling show on the financial crisis, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, co-curated with Gregory Sholette, has been presented at nine venues (2011–2016).

From 2019–2023 Ressler has worked on Barricading the Ice Sheets, a research project on the climate justice movement funded by the Austrian Science Fund. Configurations of the project are solo exhibitions at Camera Austria, Graz; Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin; Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn; LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón; The Showroom, London.

After the Barrage, the Deluge — a film by Oliver Ressler (4K, 28 min, AT/CH/MA 2022) — discusses two areas in Casablanca where major infrastructure projects have caused social upheaval on a huge scale. 

The first of these projects is now almost complete: directly in front of the Medina – the old city with its narrow streets and small shops – a massive kilometer-long seawall was built, cutting inhabitants off from the sea. A new urban panorama of concrete and glass was then built on top of the seawall, dominated by the shopping mall Casablanca Marina. 

The beach from which locals once fished has disappeared entirely, replaced by a wall of concrete. The enclosure of the seashore means even the view of the sea has come to be controlled and confined by private capital.

The second urban development scheme is located within sight of the Hassan 2 Mosque, Africa’s largest mosque since its completion in 1993. The neighborhood chosen for Projet de D’Avenue Royale consists of low-income and collapsed houses, some in the process of demolition. In the midst of the debris, evicted residents live in tents and self-built shanties without running water or electricity. Many of these people can’t afford or don’t want to move to the outskirts of this city of 4 million inhabitants, far from their informal jobs and local survival networks. The outcome of their ongoing struggles will reveal whether the government was indeed able to impose yet another capital-friendly international showcase, reproducing a wider geography of inequality. 

Both megaprojects express the same logic: urban space is reshaped by the logic of the market, not by the needs of residents. Since Morocco cannot rely on abundant natural resources, major cities are converted into growth engines of the national economy. The city itself becomes a site of extraction and driver of profit. 

Rather than the spectacular visual showpieces of an open, globalized, and market-friendly Morocco, the megaprojects should be seen for what they are: instances of an authoritarian transformation that re-institutionalizes, reassembles, and redeploys state power. 

“After the Barrage, the Deluge” (Après le barrage, le déluge) insists on the potential of opposition, taking the wrecker-king Louis XV (“Après moi, le deluge”) at his word. A wall built to repel the sea and expel the poor – a barrage in the double sense of onslaught and barricade – can always be overwhelmed by the flood-tides of social struggle. 

Director and producer: Oliver Ressler
Speakers (in the order of appearance): Resident Avenue Royale 1, Samba Soumbounou, Omar Radi, Rita Quassar, Ghassan Wail, Fatim Zahra Benhamza, Resident Avenue Royale 2, Resident Avenue Royale 3, Hicham Houdaïfa, Omar Radi
Cinematography, audio recording: Oliver Ressler
Editing: Janina Herhoffer, Oliver Ressler
Color correction: Rudolf Gottsberger
Sound and sound design: Vinzenz Schwab
Title design: Nils Olger
Translations: Imad Dahmani, Sabrina Kamili, Selma Naguib, Abdeslam Ziou Ziou
The project was commissioned by 5th Biennale Internationale de Casablanca, curated by Christine Eyene, and received support from Phileas: The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art; BMKOES: The Austrian Ministry of the Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport; and Gwärtler Stiftung.
Special thanks to Christine Eyene for supporting the project in all its stages.
Furthermore, I would like to thank Soukaina Aboulaoula, Yto Barrada, Fatim Zahra Benhamza, Koenraad Bogaert, Matthew Hyland, Hasna Jabir, Sabrina Kamili, Lisbeth Kovačič, Aline Lenzhofer, Selma Naguib, Abdeslam Ziou Ziou.

“A single poem, alone / can turn tides / scatter galaxies / and burst forth with rivers / from paradise…”

Sanober Khan

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 Simon Ng as artist in residence from January to December 2023. The artist is one of a group of 12 international artists presenting a mobile exploration of the crisis of water. The curatorial project conceived by Lanfranco Aceti will be a long-term investigation into 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 legal case as well as a case being a piece of luggage. The international sharing of knowledge, understanding, and interpretations of the current crises are paramount to resuscitate old mythologies and cultural postulates — or to develop new ones — truly inspired by communal structures of surviving, living, and possibly even thriving.

Simon Ng, is a painter and an installation artist. In 2012, he was awarded the Winston Oh’s Travel Grant and the Winston Oh’s Postgraduate Fine Art Research Fund, which allowed him to focus on the development of an aesthetic of the human body within the natural world. His artworks are inspired by multiple concerns which are rooted in and lead to the human body as the site of all that is good and evil. This is the reason why Ng’s portraits and landscapes are strictly intertwined, creating a game of mirrors and reflections through which the viewer has to discover where the emotive focus is situated — whether in the landscape or the portrait. Ng has exhibited his works in solo and collective shows in Singapore, Malaysia, Finland and other international venues. His artworks are part of numerous private collections worldwide, including the Sunpride Foundation in Hong Kong.

Ng’s works are primarily figurative and inspired by the impermanence of the human condition. They focus on issues related to identity and its portrayal. The landscapes within which human figures are placed are a reflection of human nature, and of the unstable state of the subconscious. By carefully observing the relation between the landscape and the figures that populate it, the landscape becomes a mirror of the human and the human is transformed into a reflection of untainted primordial forces. Drawing on his personal experiences and memories, the artworks explore the unconscious depths of the mind — of the artist or his sitters — and materialize as paintings, illustrations, drawings, and mixed-media artworks. The artist often distills human figures into abstractions, which are materialized in a wide range of visual permutations of shapes, colors, and forms.

As an artist, I find myself standing alone within the landscape, where memories and mythologies conjure enigmatic creatures. Nothing is as it initially appears, and the existence of mythological beings not only remains possible but also acquires an undeniable certainty that commands our attention.

For me, it all began at the source of a river — a place where it seems we, as human beings, may uncover the root of our transgressions against nature. It is here that we can delve into the essence of our destructive tendencies, ultimately leading us to confront our collective shortcomings and the toll they take on our delicate ecosystems. In these moments of awareness, the landscape undergoes transformations, giving birth to peculiar creatures that embody and exemplify the consequences of our disharmony with nature. As we navigate this existence, we, too, assume the roles of these beings, defying the natural order with our inherent flaws and eventually paying a concealed price that we will not to discover until the very end.

I have a profound interest in exploring the intricate relationships between human intervention and the environment. I emphasize the origins, transformations, and complex social and environmental impacts associated with human endeavors to ‘purify’ rivers, lakes, and seas. The acts of cleaning and cleansing necessitate establishing unattainable criteria for achieving an idealized goal. Once touched, altered, or abused, the primordial state is forever lost, just as the human psyche undergoes irrevocable changes when subjected to abuse, violence, or victimization. Nature, too, undergoes a profound metamorphosis when relentlessly exploited.

I am intrigued by the multifaceted consequences that arise from such violent relationships, even when an illusion of tranquillity cloaks the surface. Through the contemplation of past events, the present reality, and the potential future, I aspire to shed light on the profound transitions that occur as a result of our actions, bringing them — through my paintings — into the light of our consciousness.

“دل هر ذره را که بشکافی
آفتابیش در میان بینی
هاتف اصفهانی

If you split the heart of every particle,

You will see a sun in its center.”

Hatef Esfahani

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 Homa Shojaie as artist in residence from January to December 2023. The artist is one of a group of 12 international artists presenting a mobile exploration of the crisis of water. The curatorial project conceived by Lanfranco Aceti will be a long-term investigation into 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 legal case as well as a case being a piece of luggage. The international sharing of knowledge, understanding, and interpretations of the current crises are paramount to resuscitate old mythologies and cultural postulates — or to develop new ones — truly inspired by communal structures of surviving, living, and possibly even thriving.

Born in Iran, Homa Shojaie’s work is concerned with space and image and their intersection with materiality and perception. She received a Bachelor of Architecture from The Cooper Union in NYC and an MA in Fine Arts from LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore. She has taught at Pratt Institute, Illinois Institute of Technology, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Lasalle College of the Arts. She has been a visiting artist at Arts Letters and Numbers, an emergent structure opening spaces within broad human and disciplinary geographies for people and their works to listen to each other and listen to the world.  She has exhibited in Chicago, New York, Detroit, Izmir, Kashan, and Singapore. About her artistic practice she writes: “I make art to know myself, resolve my conflicts, understand mysteries, and capture the light that is inherent in any act of knowing. I try not to look at things but instead to look into the space of things.” Her work moves between disciplines of education, architecture, painting, textile, and film and is concerned with the unforeseen image and essence that become revealed through the act of making.

Girl enters the frame. There are two groups of people lying and sitting by the riverbed, the Iranian moment of Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. What is She? A creature with a suitcase. There is only one thing we know: She moves in the direction of water’s flow even when crossing it. She carries with her all the oceans she has snorkelled in. “Snorkel” is such an awkward word for such an exquisite action. She is collecting water vibes from the river flowing in Darakeh, a village near Tehran. The suitcase she is carrying was a gift to her father from her mother’s mother. Her grandmother had given her father the suitcase when her mom and dad were marrying. It was filled with gifts for him: a shirt, a tie, a set of pyjamas, a pair of slippers, and a shaving kit. She thinks about Duchamp and the bride and the bachelors and the suitcase. She remembers her dad with this suitcase going on short trips but her mom says they have never used it in that way. Her parents went to Venice years ago; in her imagination they had taken this suitcase with them. She wanted to send gifts to Venice like the old days when the three wise men took gifts for Christ. She remembers a statue of Mary in Venice with tears coming down her eyes but when she searched her photos, she did not find the image. She wanted to fill the suitcase with water drops for all the crying saints in Italy. The water drops are made out of frayed canvas in the manner that she had been making suns for the past eight years. Now she will make drops and fill the suitcase with them for all the humans that have shed a tear. The droplets remind her of her aquamarine earrings that she loved so much and mysteriously lost. They were the second pair of aquamarine earrings that she had lost. Her cousin is getting married this summer. Her name is Maryam and she has a son with bright blue eyes. The wedding is by the sea on an Island. Her gift will be a pair of aquamarine earrings. Gifts are magical. You never know how they will be received. To fill up the suitcase with drops of canvas with their flowing rays reminds me of a treasure chest, an old trunk with the lid open, overflowing with pearls, gold, rubies, emeralds and sapphires. I will make single drops, double drops, triple drops, a string of drops, and a halo of teardrops for all the Mary statues I have loved, for Anahita, Aphrodite, Venus, and Zahra, for all the gods and goddesses of water in the whole wide world. Venice is a gift herself. Once you go to Venice, you are changed; I am collecting all the light particles that reside in Darakeh and sending it to Venice with love…

Homa Shojaie June 15, 2023

“These landscapes of waters and reflections have become an obsession. It’s quiet beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel. ”

Claude Monet

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 Diego Repetto as artist in residence from January to December 2023. The artist is one of a group of 12 international artists presenting a mobile exploration of the crisis of water. The curatorial project conceived by Lanfranco Aceti will be a long-term investigation into 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 legal case as well as a case being a piece of luggage. The international sharing of knowledge, understanding, and interpretations of the current crises are paramount to resuscitate old mythologies and cultural postulates — or to develop new ones — truly inspired by communal structures of surviving, living, and possibly even thriving.

Diego Repetto is an architect, artist, and landscape critic (https://www.diegorepetpetpetpet.it/). He exhibited at the international conference de-Sign Environment Landscape City in Genoa in 2017 and then at the Venice Biennale 2018 the new concepts of Land Lighting and Fifth Landscape (Quinto Paesaggio), identifying new approaches between art and architecture in the reimagining and redesigning of the landscape. He is engaged in the research and creation of new landscapes, aesthetically viable and socially conscious, and in the analysis of the perceptions of the landscape by potential stakeholders through methodologies of experiential art. He is a member of the Italian section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), the International Landscape Research Laboratory (CIRIAF SSTAM Università di Perugia), and the Ideal Space Working Group Foundation. In 2021 it was Advisory Board of the Italian Pavilion at the XVII International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale and international speaker for the Wenzhou Polytechnic.
From 2004 to today he has published several books, essays and acts of international conferences relating to art, design, architecture, and landscape and has held as a speaker, teacher, and tutors conferences, workshops and courses: e.g. at the Macro Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome or at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT).
His works of art are preserved in the Museum of Contemporary Sacred Arte Daedalo Montali (Piedmont), in the Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art Franco Libertucci (Molise) and in the collection of Artists’ Drawings held at the Architecture Archive of the University of Genoa (Liguria).

I dream captivating artworks that stimulate the senses, combining various disciplines and collaborating with artists, architects, musicians, writers, performers, scientists, and researchers to create extraordinary experiences and perceptions. These artworks transport viewers through a realm akin to the enchanted Wonderland that Alice discovered when she stepped through the looking glass.

Influenced by a wide range of Italian and international contemporary artists, I explore the concept of spatial perception to redefine and rediscover opportunities to play a humane role in it. For instance, a floating mirror on a vast canvas painted in serene blue projects the surrounding space, propelling visitors beyond the event horizon, comparable to a “white hole” where spacetime distorts. Art becomes a gateway to new interpretations and new analyses.

Another approach involves transforming a mundane wall into a window that reveals the metamorphosis of a non-place into a space where human presence becomes the essential algorithm for comprehending that we are not merely occupying a place, but rather, we are the embodiment of space itself.

To quote the words of Buddhist philosopher and teacher Daisaku Ikeda, when we perceive the ordinary from fresh perspectives, we become capable of seeing the invisible, believing in the incredible, and receiving the seemingly impossible.

“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 is one of a group of 12 international artists presenting a mobile exploration of the crisis of water. The curatorial project conceived by Lanfranco Aceti will be a long-term investigation into 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 legal case as well as a case being a piece of luggage. The international sharing of knowledge, understanding, and interpretations of the current crises are paramount to resuscitate old mythologies and cultural postulates — or to develop new ones — truly inspired by communal structures of surviving, living, and possibly even 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 drenched in mythical and sacred visions. He is a rigorous artist and a refined intellectual with multiple cultural interests. Over the course of his long and challenging artistic journey, De Mitri’s works have been rooted in deep ethical and aesthetic reflections. They stand upon a philosophical matrix based on Platonic and Heraclitean philosophical thought linked to the social and linguistic issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 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; a perfect osmosis capable of generating and determining new cultural and aesthetic 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, Ajdovščina, 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.

Historical memory is an important resource for all human beings. For the artist, in particular, it represents regeneration of identity and respect for differences through the rediscovery of memories and indelible images.

My work as an explorer began within Mediterranean architecture, between the ancient walls of the old family farm. I journeyed between the sacred and the profane, signs and symbols: ancient and noble friezes, votive offerings, niches and icons, smells and flavors of rural and maritime civilizations, stone and terracotta, white lime, the rust of old work tools. The land, an infinite expanse of green-gold enveloped centuries-old olive trees, ears of wheat, fleshy green paddles of the prickly pears and iridescent poppies. The glare of the sun on the blue-green waters of the sea, an immense Mediterranean light changing from dawn to sunset to nights under the moon and stars, fireflies in the silence of the long drywall dominated the enchanting scenery. My cultural background is alive and present in my artistic research.

Thinking of my deep roots sublimates the reality of the present without rhetoric. In my research the Mediterranean unites East and West, amalgamating the ancestral tribal philosophies of Africa, always present in our genetic code. Each of my works becomes an opportunity for discussion, personal and at the same time a collective heritage. I am a seeker of beauty and freedom. The Mediterranean, as we well know, since ancient times has been a place of encounter, of exchange of intersections and interweaving with different cultures; a fusion of civilizations, peoples, religions, and mythologies — an unparalleled heritage of human cultures. My aesthetic research is also a symbolic journey of Homeric memory that rises to the desire for knowledge.

I believe that art serves to help us understand ourselves and others around us, those who have come before and maybe even those who will come after. Art helps us look into things and into human existence. 

I believe that art begins when we discard banal and ephemeral images.

Art is introspection; it grasps and contains what by nature is elusive and irrepressible. It helps us to discover the invisible.

“The artist is formed — and I am in line with the thought of Albert Camus — in this perpetual living between Us and the others, halfway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community from which he cannot be detached. It is for this reason that true artists do not despise anything and strive to understand instead of judging.” 

“[Wom]en’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.”

William Shakespeare

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 Laura Mega as artist in residence from January to December 2023. The artist is one of a group of 12 international artists presenting a mobile exploration of the crisis of water. The curatorial project conceived by Lanfranco Aceti will be a long-term investigation into 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 legal case as well as a case being a piece of luggage. The international sharing of knowledge, understanding, and interpretations of the current crises are paramount to resuscitate old mythologies and cultural postulates — or to develop new ones — truly inspired by communal structures of surviving, living, and possibly even thriving.

Laura Mega works between Rome and New York. She is the creator and curator of the ‘DREAMERS’ art project and co-founder of the ‘LAZZARO_art doesn’t sleep’ project. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and at the University of Image in Milan (a school centered on the five senses founded by photographer Fabrizio Ferri). Her practice combines drawing, text, embroidery, wool yarn, and printing. In addition, she sometimes uses other materials (such as pink epilating wax) on old trousseaus: sets of clothes, linens, and other accessories that a bride would bring with her to the new house. Through a contemporary and straightforward language, Laura Mega transforms symbols of a constricted and predefined femininity into works capable of conveying and investigating emotional, social, and political issues, where the irony leaves the observer responsible for the different depths of reading and interpretation. Laura Mega has exhibited at Ivy Brown Gallery (NYC), M55 Art Gallery (NYC), Resobox Gallery (NYC), Endless Biennial (NYC), Sejong Museum of Art (Seoul), MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (Rome), MADXI (Latina), Every Woman Biennial (London), Clio Art Fair (NYC), BAF – Bergamo Art Fair, Textile Museum of Busto Arsizio for the WTA – World Textile Art_Textile Biennial, Embroidery Museum (Valtopina), KOU Gallery (Rome). She has had collaborations with Moleskine S.p.A., SOME SERIOUS BUSINESS (Los Angeles), PULSE Art Fair – Art Basel Miami, Culture Monks (India), SENSE LAB (Milan), The Blue Bus Project (NYC). With the publishing house Pulcinoelefante (Milan), she has produced two artist’s books in a 33-copy limited edition. In 2021 she wrote and illustrated two artist books: “Amazoniano_ il nuovo HERO”, the result of her performative research on Amazon warehouse workers, and “ThePinkSide of WTF” in two versions, one of which is to be colored. Her work is part of the Moleskine Foundation, KOU Gallery, and private collections.

As an artistic practice I use embroidery, which in history has traditionally been entrusted to women. I want to light a beacon on the female world, but I shun all clichés and subvert them.  Where flowers and lace appear in my art, there is no frivolity; but behind an appearance of delicacy I lightly conceal my sharp messages.

By changing or overturning with my art the appearance of the form of reality, the perceived balance in all things suddenly falls apart.

Embroidery for me is simultaneously a slow and fast artistic practice, as if it were an instinctual and well-known ritual. In my artworks where text is printed, and not embroidered, each individual letter is impressed on the fabric with the pressure of my hands. For each of my artworks it is as if I am administering CPR to give them the breath of life.

Embroidery adds delicacy even if the embroidered subject or word has such a force as to contradict the gentle technique itself.

Everyone has their own idea of what the function of art is or should be. As far as I am concerned my approach to art, and art itself, borders on the obsessive. It is a necessity, a cure, a way to externalize and exasperate, to communicate, and raise awareness.

In my case, I like that my art leaves people with a smile on their lips, and a little bitter aftertaste in their mouths.

Irony is my subversive act. I sneak up unexpectedly to destabilize and leave the mind of the spectator in doubt and yet, somehow, freed.

Slowly my subversive irony enters the mind, giving it time to metabolize the content while  leaving an indelible mark that stays as a parting gift.

I am a keen and careful observer of the sh*tshow that is the contemporary world and through my art I critique it by laying bare, with full emotion, the possibilities or impossibilities of my freedom of expression.

For this very reason as an artist I have the responsibility to communicate, support, and defend those who have no voice or are not heard. My artistic practices bypasses collective stereotypes and condenses the artistic form of expression into a pure splash of color.