Michal Mitro

Post-medial tendencies, sculpturality and visuality are defining pillars of my current practice. My working method is best described as artistic research and its outputs often take a hybrid artScience shape. Topics that resonate often in my works explore the present and future states of our planet, politico-economic societal constellations and the relationship between the human and non-human. I strive to utilise artistic practice as a specific platform for sharing information and to that end I utilise various immersive and narrative strategies.

In recent years I’ve exhibited and performed mainly in Czechia (Vasulka Kitchen, Letna Studio, Korespondance, Prototyp), Slovakia (Kasarne, DIG gallery, VUNU) and across Europe (Gamma Festival, Petersburg; Mediamatic, Amsterdam; JRM, Paris; Trafo, Budapest; Genius Loci, Weimar; Grey Space, den Haag; AV depot, London). Besides being an active art practitioner, I’m also part of the STELLA (Somatic Tech Lab) research unit that maps the convergences of technologies and movement-based arts in Central Europe. I, too, curate ssesi.space in Brno, Czechia.

portfolio: michalmitro.com
mail: [email protected]

Planetary Thermodynamics: Energy Justice

With the work called Planetary Thermodynamics: Energy Justice I aim to depict the history of a utopia. One which has never happened. But what is more important, one which may happen. The initial stimulus is personal experience – an effort to create a temporary autonomous zone in a particular garden colony in Brno-Jundrov. This docufiction story starts where my personal experience ends.

The impossibility or inability to transform a slice of space-time out of Fukuyama’s end of history becomes the subject of research into speculative archaeology. I apply its methods to research into the current state of things from the point of view of the future status quo. This re-established ideology – a utopia and its unavoidable matter-of-factness – together with the above-mentioned historical excursion is the principal carrier of the meaning/message of the work.

Through the spatial-visual arrangement of objects I intend to retell the story of a new future. It is built on the synergic interconnection of technological and natural sources and finally rejects and overcomes the anthropocentric dichotomy nature-culture. It perceives silicon and carbon chips and semiconductors in their mineral substantiality as augmented natural entities. The fauna and the flora have been re-acknowledged with the status of autonomous intelligent actors. The social, economic and political order of human relationships is built on a new distribution of material and symbolic being. This is derived directly from energy outputs and inputs calculated in Watts and Joules, which completely cancelled racial, gender, national, status and any other so far practised ways of social and generic segregation and exploitation.

The work is an outcome of my long-term interest in the relationship of man, nature and technology in its multiple present and possible future positions.