Giulia Cacciuttolo is an artist based in London, originally from Rome. She works across sculpture, installation and photography, between theoretical and practical research.
Her research is focused on investigating memory and specifically about contemporary archives and archival forms and how we relate to them in order to hand down our histories to next generations. This led her to question what is the role of memory and of the past for us as individuals and as a society and what the concept of heritage means today.
One of her aims is to examine what lies behind the selection – and therefore exclusion – of artefacts, artworks and histories in archives and collections, starting from questioning what an archive is today. She is interested in understanding the dynamics and tensions between individuals, communities and the relation with their past, in particular with the people in charge of the selection of what will be ‘officially’ remembered.
How many histories have been discarded from this selection and then forgotten? Are we condemned to analyse and present the past from just a single point of view? Is there a more ‘sustainable’ way of relating to the past? Have we ever really taken the time to question what – or whose – version of the past we carry with us?
She recently started to investigate the physical relationship between memory, space and landscape, seen as an archive, a stratification of histories and memories of the communities that inhabit it. More specifically, she is currently exploring and researching – both theoretically and materially - those parts of the landscape – both natural and artificial – which can be defined liminal, of passage from one state/place/moment to another, not completely part of either of them.
Her theoretical research has always been accompanied by a strong technical and visual practice interested in exploring the role of images and sculpture around these themes. Through the use of different printing techniques on various supports – latex, silk and wax among others –, analogue photography and different casting techniques with jesmonite and plaster, she recently started to investigate the physical relationship between memory, space and landscape.