By Santiago Elias
A decade after his first residency, multidisciplinary artist Mito Elias has made a highly anticipated return to Artsbox with Palimp_Texto Dialogues – a profound, research-driven project that reimagines the urban landscape through the lens of poetry, memory, and spatial storytelling.
This multilayered work frames the city as a living palimpsest – an ancient manuscript scraped clean and rewritten, yet still bearing the ghostly traces of previous texts. Mito expands this ancient concept into a powerful metaphor for the contemporary urban environment. He proposes that the city is a constantly evolving text, inscribed and revised by the overlapping languages, histories, and lived experiences of its inhabitants.
At the core of Palimp_Texto Dialogues is a compelling question: how do we read the hidden stories embedded in a city’s surfaces, and how do these layered narratives shape our sense of place and identity?
This inquiry pushes the definition of poetry far beyond the printed page. For Mito, poetry is not confined to written verse—it is a dynamic, interdisciplinary force that lives in visual installations, ambient soundscapes, spoken word, and gestural performance. His work challenges linear storytelling, instead unearthing the rich, non-linear poetics inherent in the everyday city. From hand-painted shopfronts and torn posters on public walls to graffiti in laneways and cryptic symbols on manhole covers, every fragment of urban text becomes a ready-made poem, waiting to be read, reinterpreted, and reimagined.
A vital element of this new chapter is collaboration. Throughout the residency, Mito has worked closely with local Footscray artists, poets, and creative communities. These partnerships are more than contributors to the project—they are its lifeblood. Together, they have co-created reading programs, poetic performances, and participatory installations designed to leave a lasting imprint on the community long after the residency ends.
At its heart, Palimp_Texto Dialogues is a commitment to community engagement and co-authorship. In partnership with Footscray Library, the project will transform a public space into a vibrant cultural laboratory. Far more than just a venue, the library becomes a creative hub and ideas incubator—a space for dialogue, memory, learning, and expression. Through workshops and collaborative activities, audiences are invited not just to observe but to actively shape the evolving artwork. Here, the boundaries between artist and audience, performance and participation, dissolve in meaningful and unexpected ways.
Alongside the library, Artsbox itself plays a pivotal role as a creative engine for this residency. Long established as a space for experimentation and innovation, Artsbox continues to thrive as an incubator for artistic ideas and socially engaged practices. Mito’s return marks a full-circle moment, but also a clear evolution – from his 2015 project Scripta – Writings of the World, which explored the global migration of text and language, to this more intimate and site-specific exploration of the local residues of diaspora.
Palimp_Texto Dialogues is ultimately a work of poetic cartography. It does not map Footscray through its roads and buildings, but through its languages, gestures, and visual echoes. It invites us to read the city not as infrastructure, but as an ongoing manuscript – one authored collectively by those who live, move, and speak within it.
By slowing down and paying attention to the overlooked and the in-between, Mito Elias invites all of us to become co-authors in the writing of place – a living archive brimming with memory, meaning, and infinite poetic possibility.
*Mito’s Palimp_Texto Dialogues poetic installations are on display at Footscray Library until October 6th.
