Giulio R. M. Maffii
Giulio R. M. Maffii works across poetry, collage, photography, and visual writing, treating each form as part of a larger investigation into language, identity, and contemporary forms of alienation. His practice is shaped by literature and visual culture, but also by an interest in systems that appear impersonal or administrative: diagrams, office graphics, SmartArt structures, and bureaucratic visual language. In his work, these systems become ways of representing a self that is fragmented, mobile, and often uncertain of its own position.
Maffii grew up between Florence and the sea. Florence’s dense artistic history, together with the experience of travel and a sustained engagement with other cultures, informed the way he thinks about space, movement, and identity. His academic training began in ethnohistory before he deepened his literary studies. He began writing early, while his visual practice developed later. For a time, poetry and image-making remained separate pursuits. Eventually, he felt compelled to bring them into contact.
He does not describe this shift as a single breakthrough, but as a sequence of movements among different literary and artistic concerns. His approach to “Spatial Poetry” emerged from a desire to find a position outside both conventional lyric poetry and the category of research poetry as it is often understood in Italy. He looks to the historical avant-gardes, concrete poetry, and visual poetry as precedents for writing that moves beyond a linear page.
Digital technology accelerated that expansion, making it possible for language to move through virtual architecture, fragmented identities, and multiple forms of interaction. Maffii became interested in borrowing visual systems from everyday communication because they could register the alienation of contemporary life without requiring a conventional narrative explanation. This research led to Copia, published in the United States by Wet Cement Press and in Italy by Pietre Vive Editore.
His influences are intentionally wide-ranging. Literature, cinema, music, photography, anthropology, and visual art all enter the work, and he resists allegiance to a single tradition or school. This refusal of what he calls intellectual monogamy is also a working method. It allows poetry, collage, and photography to reactivate one another rather than remain separate disciplines.
That exchange is especially visible in Maffii’s collage work, which centers on a recurring figure: a young surfer named Dudo. Dudo is a real person with whom Maffii has surfed, and the two share what the artist describes as a slight familial resemblance. Yet within the collages, the subject gradually moves away from biography. Maffii places Dudo in repeated, changing scenarios that resemble parallel realities, dream sequences, or hostile environments. Through serial repetition, the figure becomes less stable and less singular.
The character’s repetition functions as more than a visual device. It produces an uneasy effect of cloning, displacement, and altered identity. Dudo appears as a free-spirited figure placed where freedom seems impossible, but Maffii does not frame him as a passive victim of contemporary society. Instead, he moves through absurd or inhospitable environments with irony and detachment. The surreal quality of the images becomes a way of approaching a world increasingly defined, in Maffii’s view, by simulation, artificial light, and surface appearances.
Maffii works mainly with his own photographs, occasionally incorporating freely accessible archival material. His digital process remains deliberately artisanal. He is not interested in polished systems that automate image-making through prompts or software. Imperfection, slight misalignment, and error are important because they retain what he sees as the instability of human perception. The aim is not seamlessness, but a productive friction between image, context, and viewer.
The serial structure of the Dudo collages parallels the recurring anaphora “There is one” in Copia. In both cases, repetition creates a form of internal architecture. Narrative remains important to Maffii even when the work is fragmented or visually disorienting. Without a structure beneath it, he argues, poetry and visual art risk becoming arbitrary accumulations rather than works with direction.
Multilingualism is another structural element in his practice. Maffii writes in Italian, English, and Spanish, not in pursuit of exact translation but through the creation of versions. A poem changes when it changes language: its tone may become colder, more fragile, more ironic, or more ambiguous. “No language tells the truth,” he writes. “Each one lies differently.” For Maffii, this does not make language useless. It makes its failures and displacements artistically meaningful.
His approach to making is therefore disciplined rather than dependent on sudden inspiration. Study, observation, patience, and exposure to other forms are as important as intuition. When one form becomes stagnant, he moves to another: poetry, collage, or photography. The shift is less an escape from the work than a way of continuing it by another route.
Maffii is currently preparing a new book following an Italian literary prize, alongside upcoming appearances in international magazines connected to his collage and photographic work. Across these projects, he continues to examine the unstable border between language, image, identity, and perception, using repetition and formal displacement to make contemporary experience visible without simplifying it.
