The body and shelter: right to water and contemporary art. A conversation with Gian Maria Tosatti

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Contemporary art is the realm of symbol, and sovereign of symbol is the metaphor. It is in the wake of a metaphor that Ossigeno is today grateful to Gian Maria Tosatti (b. Rome, 1980, lives and works in Naples) for having accepted our invitation to walk through these pages on the track of a fertile ground: that of the metaphor between art and water.

Art vivifying like water.
Plastic like water.
Powerful like water.
Right to freedom of art, as free is – or should be – water.
It is in the name of the symbolic and prismatic power of water that the greatest contemporary artists have sprinkled and submerged their artworks, but having chosen Gian Maria Tosatti – trustee, in 2022, of Italy’s two major art institutions, the Venice Biennale and the Rome quadrennial – as a beacon, to investigate the protection that contemporary art puts in place with respect to the universal right to water, transcends the shape and involves the essence: beyond the significant, poetic and symbolic use of the aquatic element within his art, Gian Maria Tosatti is a body of water.

I mean: H2 O, two parts of hydrogen and one of oxygen, to give life to the substance that quintessentially gives life. Degreed in Directing, graduated in Modern Literature, artist, essayist, reviewer and cultural columnist, his structure, like that of water, is composite.
And more. Drawn out of the website of a contemporary art temple the likes of Pirelli HangarBicocca: «The practice of the Italian artist Gian Maria Tosatti is focused on the concepts of identity, collectiveness and memory, in their historical, political and spiritual value. Carrying out long and articulated researches, and dipping freely into the language of visual arts, performance and architecture, Tosatti creates majestic site-specific installations, often conceived for entire buildings or urban areas and intended to last for long periods of time. His work also involves the communities connected to the places where his artworks, often marked by a strong sense of cyclicity, take shape». Cyclicity. Dipping. Permeability. Collectiveness. Fluidity. Long-lasting. Even his official biography has the features of water.
And still: imaginary is the primary source from which the artist draws in order to give substance to his vision, and in one of his editorials dated 2009 for that luminous stolperstein called La Differenza – whose he has been parent, before having been the director – he wrote: «Imaginary is a soft world, made of mercury, traversable, rapid, elusive, liquid, made up of desires and fears. Yet sometimes entering the world of the imaginary, crossing it, becomes an obligatory step to continue towards a certain direction, to be able to go truly further. Imaginary becomes the river that you have to swim across».

With the awareness of the precious value of water, and with the will to undermine prejudicial clichés, I would tell that both the work and the imaginary of Gian Maria Tosatti make water: they do generate and nourish. And as a Calabrian who lives by the sea, in a Calabria that smells like that Naples that Tosatti has chosen as his home, I am equally aware that a body of water needs water.
That’s what he himself has confirmed to me: «In 2013, I began a project in Naples called Seven Seasons of the Spirit. Three years of intense work. I moved there from New York, the city where I lived. Peppe Morra, a great patron of the arts, made me available a house with two rooms. One was the studio where I had to work. It had small windows, set very high, you could hardly see out. Only the sky could be seen. The other one was the bedroom, with six large windows, from sky to earth. They all overlooked the Gulf of Naples. Below there was the city. Facing the sea. All-out. Nothing to cover it. At night, the glow from the lighthouse came looking for me in the corners. Once finished the project, in 2016 I moved back to New York, but two years later I decided to go back and live in Naples, to establish my studio there. And I decided that I would have done it, only if I had been able to find another house whose windows could overlook the sea. And so it was».

There is still a reason why Gian Maria Tosatti can bear witness to the relationship between contemporary art and water, and it lies in that sameness between his way of working and what Leonardo called the blood of the Earth, between sea, sky and soil, between evaporation, condensation, precipitation and infiltration: it’s the water cycle, and it’s simply vital.
One of the constants in Tosatti’s work is that of working in cycles. Visual novels, as they have often been called, sequential chapters making up a single, powerful portrait. About the duality of human nature, both transcendent and mundane, in Devotions (2005-2011). Concerning the relationship with space, in Landscapes (2006-2011), and with memory, in The considerations on the intentions of my first holy communion remain a dead letter (2009-2014). About the alien solitude that flows from the broken promises of New York, in I’ve already been here (2011-2014).

On the path of redemption whose inspiration has been The interior castle (1577) by Saint Teresa of Avila – who divided the human soul into seven rooms, turned by Tosatti into seven touching soul places by recovering and regenerating as many historic and abandoned buildings of Naples, almost as if they were the spiritual exercises of those masterpieces by Leonardo Sciascia in literature (1974) and by Elio Petri in cinematography (1976) the likes of Todo Modo – in Seven Seasons of the Spirit (2013-2016).
About the shipwreck of Europe in the Jungle of Calais in Histoire et Destin (2015-2016), as about the shipwreck of the very idea of democracy already crystallized in Catania, Riga, Cape Town, Odessa, Istanbul, ready to set sail for new ports, in My heart is a void, the void is a mirror (2018-2025). The same History of Night and Destiny of Comets through which the Italian Pavilion, at the 59th Venice Art Biennale, presented itself to the rest of the world relying for the fist time on him as sole singer, was in two acts.

 

Panta rei, everything flows, is an adage that encompasses history and an attitude, and that of Tosatti is an artistic history that I would read as a single, powerful cycle where, as for the water cycle, the very presence of human being evaporates, from performance to the purest environmental installation. As for water, however, that of human being is not an absence, but rather a sublimation in what Tosatti has often defined as the wisdom of the vanquished: crossing every south of the world, where thirst is s trongest, «The temporarily vanquished respond to the conflict with alternative reactions, not seeking a revanche, but inventing another way to improve history», he wrote.
As for the arte di arrangiarsi, the art of getting by, also made of pasta mista, put together with the remains of other packages of pasta, and spaghetti alle vongole fujute, or fled clams. As for The skin (1949) by Curzio Malaparte, where real winners are those who carry the weight of their defeat with dignity, creativity, poetry. As for the law of the sea, not codified and for this reason the most humane of laws, which requires you to save a life not by legal, but by moral obligation. Chi tene ‘o mare cammina c’a vocca salata, whoever holds the sea walks with a salted mouth, Pino Daniele sang, between the illusion of everything and the confirmation of nothing; but, accomplice brother, «The sea has no country either, and it belongs to all those who listen to it», wrote Giovanni Verga, author of the cycle of the vanquished. Back to contemporary, Everything burns is the title of one of the most recent theatrical productions by Motus, a free adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan women, telling of a conquered and sold off civilization. Not the end of the world, but the end of one world, of an exhausted paradigm.
When everything burns, water can save and regenerate. And when everything burns, art is cathartic. «The task of art is to make us feel the burning of an unsustainable condition within our veins, which demands our change. For me, tragedy is the founding act of modern art, a founding act based on the mechanism of catharsis, and catharsis is not morality. Catharsis really means coming out of a tragedy with the blood burning in your veins and telling you that you cannot continue to be what you have been up to now, because you must change», were his words during the press conference at the presentation of the Italian Pavilion, in February 2022.

Salvific water, cathartic art. But, as for water, art needs to be independent, that both should never be made into bargaining chips. Free water, free art. It is the suffering scenery that therefore becomes his favorite setting, never treading a supposedly complacent hand on decay, on uncontrolled gentrification, on abandonment, but rather imagining a new, totally different life, a regeneration, because it is right where an open wound bleeds that art, like sterile water, can heal. Water, is taught by thirst is the first line of an 1859 poem by Emily Dickinson.
That is why I ask him, in art and culture, what makes him thirsty and what, on the other hand, q uenches his thirst: «Sometimes being thirsty is a foretaste of the water that will quench our thirst. That is what quadrennial is representing to me: to fix, piece by piece, all the unsolved problems that have compromised the formation of my artistic generation. Without fanfare, without pretensions, without expecting to convince anyone. We re-established the balance in silence, just working. And this incontestability of a key fact in the history of an artistic generation has been the sense of satisfaction that I already foretasted when, together with my traveling companions, we were dehydrated almost up to collapse».

Sure, broad shoulders are needed to support, like a contemporary Atlas, not only the two thousand

square meters of the Pavilion, but also the artistic direction of the Rome quadrennial, the highest

national institution that studies, promotes and frames every four years the state of contemporary

art in Italy, for which Tosatti received the appointment almost simultaneously with the call for the

Biennale. Assignments like gigantic loads, but the lesson can come to us, once again, from water, H2

O, two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.
Tosatti answered the double call from the Biennale and the Quadrennial – a call to arms to arts, faithful to Brecht in considering art as humankind’s last line of defense – with a thirst-quenching, sacrosanct statement: «I am an artist, and if I run a cultural institution I’m where I have to be. This is a time when the artist is conceived as a figure who uses a paintbrush to create pleasant decorations. No, the artist is exactly like Leonardo Da Vinci, like Bernini, like Pasolini: highly cultured men with transversal knowledge; people who, in order to be able to do one thing, must be able to do ten more». I tell him that, where I live, once there was a mini-market, very popular among grandparents who used to send you there at least once a day, called Not everything but a bit of all, an example of all the poetic welcome treasured by vernacular (that minimart has now become a betting parlour, which says it all, but that’s another story). And then I reconnect to the luminous Adriano Olivetti’s parable, who used to hire within his company in groups of three – one economist, one technician and one humanist – in order to keep the interdisciplinary dialogue fertile, quoting the words of another editorial he wrote about the need for a school reform able to leverage educators with a prismatic culture as a trigger for a real, harmonious evolution, «because there is no way I can explain aesthetics without quantum mechanics».

 

H2 O, two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen, to give life to the substance that quintessentially gives life. Provided that art won’t ever be a formula, I’d however like to know, according to him, which are the hydrogen and the oxygen, those sine qua non elements making up the artist’s equally vivifying s tructure, and I realize how much for him, as for water, stagnant separations cannot exist: «I think the problem, in recent decades, lies into that yearning to divide molecules. People tend to think simply. As if 1+1 simply made 2. But it’s not like that. Two is not the sum of 2 units. It’s a whole other concept. A person and another person, when together, are not 2 singularities. They are travel companions (and therefore an element is added, travel). They are brothers (and there an element is added, family, natural or elective). They are lovers (and there an element is added, love). And I could go on and on… History of art is made up of those stories very difficult to write alone. Also because that account that doesn’t add up, that surplus that lies in two compared to the simple sum of 2 units, moves values such as travel, family, love and many other elements that we have not mentioned, and that we could infinitely. You got that right. From the union of two rather dangerous gases to humans, hydrogen and oxygen, the element that allows life on this planet is born. So you see, not only does 1 + 1 merely equals 2, but even two reverses the value of 1+1. So it is with art».

And he continues: «That is why, when I was a boy, I fought with all my strength not to be brought back to normal – or to whatever was assumed to be so. You know, at the age of twenty-two I was in charge of the performance column in a newspaper, I was a theater and dance critic, I directed a research group that tackled the physical principles of performance and I had just published my first theory book as curator. I was a scandal. I remember it vividly. Either you choose or we ditch you. Everyone told me that, even those I hadn’t asked. For the sake of reiterating that an artist is an artist, a critic is a critic, a theorist is a theorist… What a wretchedness! And what a nescience! They did not have the slightest awareness that Italian artistic tradition listed figures ranging from Leonardo (physicist, painter, engineer), to Michelangelo (writer, painter, sculptor, architect), to Bernini (painter, sculptor, architect, theater director), up to Pasolini (journalist, poet, movie director, playwright) and Testori (journalist, art critic, poet, playwright, director)».
«Indeed, then, it went like this: they ditched me. They said I didn’t have what it takes to make it. I remember it well, I aroused distrust. And so I went to live elsewhere, in a country much less attentive to labelling. I’ve been there for ten years. When I came back, many of those who hadn’t believed in me were no longer in the game. Maybe they should have worried a little more about themselves. Today I no longer have to fight for myself, but I am willing to do it for everyone else. And that’s why I took on the responsibility of directing the quadrennial. The goal is to build an infrastructure so that this country can give full dignity to its artists, without them having to go and take refuge abroad».

A call to arts, as we were saying. Tosatti reiterates this to me when I make my own his lesson on the need for fluidity – identitarian, professional, interrelational, interdisciplinary – as urgent viaticum for salvation, switching between the chemistry of water and the physics of liquids, to ask him about art. «A body immersed in a liquid experiences an upthrust equal to the weight of the liquid displaced»: it is the so-called Archimedes’ Thrust, a principle explaining the reason why, when immersed in water, we do not sink. Into the fluid stream of contemporary art (or wannabe so, when it believes that it is enough to proclaim itself as an artivist by cutting off a lock of hair in favor of the camera and in the name of martyred Iran – wow, who do you think you are, Samson? – without understanding that, if it is worthy to be called art, it won’t need phantom labels because it already has, by birthright, its hands engaged in washing away blood and abuses), I ask him what is that precise Archimedes’ Thrust spurring him to get up, take his coffee and make art, never drowning in artwashing’s troubled water.

Tosatti answers without hesitation: «That strength is called obedience. Saint Teresa of Avila also talked about it. There are very high callings in our life. We can decide to obey, or pretend not to have heard».
For those who confine themselves to the mere navigation on the surface of water, this might seem a pretentious, partly neocatechumenal answer. But Gian Maria Tosatti is not an artist, let alone a man, leaving himself open to superficiality; Tosatti looks straight into the abyss, plunging into it, and it is right from there where rescue is most needed that he always designs a way out. In these days when I am re-reading our conversation, I am witnessing the hydrogeological devastation that struck Ischia, and as I write down the words of the interview I think back to his own words, written in 2015 on the occasion of a previous, umpteenth disruption caused by that fragility that we have bartered for omnipotence: «They will tell us: “The world is collapsing and you draw flowers?”. We will answer: “We draw flowers precisely because the world is collapsing”».
Because that’s what art is: tugging at consciences through the power of an icon. Because 1+1 doesn’t give 2, but two. Because we all live on the shores of the same sea, each one called to the obedience of indulging, and possibly sharing, one’s own gift. Because no one can still infamously believe to be able to save itself on its own. Because, alongside the claim of a right, every human being should never forget the duty of caring.

Thinking about caring, Neapolitan coffee comes to mind, which is said to be the best. Beyond the fact that I devoutly agree, the most accredited motivation seems to be one über alles: water, the one that f lowed from the Serino source and filled the aqueduct of Naples.
Of course, water, one of the two ingredients that make up coffee, is crucial; but, as always, it must be handled with care. An ancient Neapolitan story goes like this: «If the wise Neapolitan points to the cup of coffee that he has prepared, the fool looks at the coffee»; instead he should look at the finger, and then go back from the finger to the arm, and from this to the wise Neapolitan who has just prepared it, with wisdom, with care. In Naples, the finger is ‘o rito, which sounds like rite. And that’s what coffee is in Naples: an anthropological rite, a social liturgy as revered as Saint Gennaro, a welcome accelerator, a warm and fluid embrace all crystal clear within the monologue by Eduardo de Filippo, proud to confide to the neighbor-across professor his secrets regarding the care of coffee preparation in Oh, these ghosts! (1945).

Let me take full responsibility, in times when schwa ə is necessary for a certain intelligentsia, in saying that Naples is female. That Lampedusa is female. That Calais has been female, and that Tosatti himself is, every time he turns the urgency of shelter into art – he himself underlined, in his autobiography, how important it has been, in terms of constructing an entirely Fellinian imaginary, being raised by two female parents, his mother and his aunt (just like Raffaella Carrà, dare I say out of my undying devotion).
And yes, I say that even water is female, relying on a contemporary sociological theory, that of Astrida Neimanis’ hydrofeminism, which has highlighted a powerful congruence in the «intense intimacy between the value of water and the care of women» , in the common self-giving to welcome, in becoming marine and mother (mer et mère, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 1986). The source of hydrofeminism is gestationality, the ability to generate and welcome the other-than-self, which has become even more necessary today in the relation with limited water resources, in creating new, fluid and encompassing, imaginaries to «visualize, act and experience water» (Antonella De Vita, Corpi d’acqua. La svolta idrofemminista di Astrida Neimanis, 2021).
Out of the alienation of assembly line logics, learning from water and feminine the adaptability, the relationality and the resistance, De Vita wrote: «Water is capable of connecting bodies, making them f low one into each other, move by inter-permeation. Water hybridises subjectivities, it crosses the boundaries of individualism, it declares, in overcoming the boundary between the Self and the Other, communion and solidarity», turning the thought into amniotic, the body into interactive, open to confluences, determining the vital importance of the care capability.

That welcoming care put into the preparation of coffee in Naples, that Tosatti puts into art, in the conception and preparation of his environmental installations. On second thought, contemporary art (and bankruptcy auctions…) are guilty of having emptied of its original meaning a poetic practice such as that of care through the creation of a specific professionalism, that of the curator, who from giver of hospitality has turned into a kind of pagan demigod of the aforementioned intelligentsia, whose main occupation seems to be that of making art unwelcoming – which, in the verbose barrier erected, is the exact opposite of the watery, maternal practice proper to the care.
So I ask him, for an art – his one – already maternal, watery and full of care, if the figure of the curator can still make sense, and his answer navigates the route of that 1+1 he has just described to me: «You see, the problem lies in simplifications. What is a curator? A label. Neither more nor less. But a label risks being reduced to an infinitesimal perimeter, compared to the fullness of the phenomenon. It’s like saying who is an Italian. Who is a white. Who is a black. Who is an immigrant. I said this once during a Lincoln Center lecture. It was a large panel with many immigration experts. Half of them, like me, were foreigners residing in America. But they were used to speak of migrants using the word “they”. I, who spoke for last, had to point it out to them. It is from these kind of simplifications that our defeat as a civilization arises. And this goes for big things, as well as for small ones. I don’t know any curators, and I’m not interested in knowing them. I know men and women with whom I want to work because their attitudes can make an important contribution to the journey I intend to take. Sometimes their one is a critical, sometimes organizational, sometimes a human kind of contribution. Often a combination of all of these. But the point is that, to me, it may make sense to have someone like Eugenio Viola, like Alessandra Troncone or Vicente Todolì next to me. I think about people, not about their role».

This too is very similar to the lesson of water, made up of strong ties. Furthermore, vital and powerful, water changes shape according to its container. Just like art. So, let’s dive into the aesthetics of water.
I think of water as fluidity, for the art of Roni Horn.
Water as purification, for the art of Bill Viola.
Water as atonement, for the art of Marina Abramović.
Water as future, for the art of Ólafur Elíasson.
Water as movement, for the art of Pina Bausch.
Water as transformation, for the art of the Masbedo.
Water as abyss, for the art of Per Barclay.
Water as power, for the art of Anish Kapoor.
Water as tears, for the art of Francesco Vezzoli.
Water as raw material, for the art of Gino De Dominicis.
And I think of Gian Maria Tosatti, and of water as a right, so universal as much as in need of shelter. His works are often flooded, submerged, they are fluid, they are thirsty. Fragile water like shattered glass crystals inundating floors. Water and mud to be shovelled merging with the horizon line, for the Odessa Episode of the cycle My heart is a void, the void is a mirror. «Yes – he tells me – water recurs in my work. I am thinking of the thousand square meters of the second shed of our national Pavilion, completely flooded. But I am also thinking of an element that was almost at the end of one of my most anguishing works, 4_Homecoming, for the Seven Seasons of the Spirit. It was a glass full of water, with a bottle of Novalgina next to it. Then I think of the open taps of the large installation at Casa Bossi (Tetralogy of Dust, 2012, Ed.’s Note), as if that precipice between the tap and the bottom of the sink could show the blood of this enormous nineteenth-century building, which flowed from the veins of lead in the walls and returned to them. And then there is a work from 2009, The white room, where the sense of death was given by the sound of water audible from the shower room of a closed and completely dark factory. And, finally, I remember one of the works I love the most, Rassa, a reel to-reel recorder that reproduces the sound of the high seas».
«Water is a great enigma», reflects Tosatti. «Baudelaire used to say that he looked at the sea to look at himself. And perhaps we look into a glass, as in a mirror, to see only a portion of our figure, perhaps the part that hurts and needs to be soothed, maybe, with a medicine».
Thus, the warning treasured by his aesthetics of water is related to that desperate vitality evoked by Pasolini, and to a feeling of rebirth: «Often water has to deal with death in my work, but also with life. The death of the other, sometimes, makes us realize that we are still alive, that we still have time».

Time. In his installations it seems suspended, crystallized. It is almost impossible to give them a temporal connotation, a probable scenic device coming from his degree in Directing – at the Centre for Experimentation and Theater Research in Pontedera, Tuscany, where a giant like Jerzy Grotowski worked – to satisfy a precise, expressed will: that of turning his art into an aesthetic, ecstatic, never anaesthetic experience, and the visitor into a performer, immersing him in an environment free from any temporal wink. «His research constitutes a unicum within the contemporary artistic panorama, and it is profoundly influenced by the original sin of theater», in Eugenio Viola’s words. By defining museums as intensive care units for works of art, and admonishing not to confuse «the cemetery, with all its sacredness, with the spaces of life», Gian Maria Tosatti sanitizes art from naphthalene-like pomposity, first cause of a certain snotty nose, and leaves it free to flow down the street. «I think the practice of the artist is to carry the battle, like a captain of fortune, from city to city. And in order to do this, the event must take place in the street, among the people, like a civil war, a civility war. It would be very weird to fight a war in the retreat of museums or galleries», he wrote in 2013. Bringing art into the spaces of life fluidifies the separation between art and life by simply dissolving it, melting that barrier, definitively elevating the artistic experience to the vital one.

Esperienza e Realtà. Teoria e Riflessioni sulla Quinta Dimensione (transl. Experience and Reality. Theory and Reflections on the Fifth Dimension, 2022) is the title of his latest essay, in which Tosatti writes of environmental art as a practice aware of the five-dimensionality of reality – made up of length, width, depth, time and, indeed, experience, physical and cognitive visitor’s perception – putting into words what he is used to put into art. His installations can be accessed by simply opening closed doors in the middle of a street, visual novels mainly devoid of advertising and communicative hype – if not the sincerest one, that of the word of mouth – in front of which one at the time can be mirrored, in silence, because you don’t need an audio guide to experience art. And in front of those who, more or less, covertly accuse him of making scenography rather than art, he, more or less, doesn’t care, replying through art itself; because if the real performer is the spectator, his duty as an artist can only be that of preparing for him the most intense scenography.

In talking about it with Gian Maria, it seems to me as clear as water that having made his art publicly experienceable responds above all to an act of gratitude. In fact, his sentimental education grew up in the street, in that Rome which is an open-air museum, with free admission and equally free consumption, within which, on the road to the pitch, a child stumbles upon a Bernini, a Borromini, today also upon a Kentridge, which will silently go to occupy the crystalline seats of the imaginary and which will be ready to re-emerge, as soon as one will draw on it.
«As a kid – he tells me – I was used to go every day to visit my grandmother at the San Giacomo hospital in Rome. We used to take the bus and go down along the Lungotevere. From there, we walked past the Ara Pacis and the mausoleum of Augustus, then along Via del Corso, passing in front of Canova’s studio – which is now Ontani’s – and then inside the hospital, whose architecture has perhaps been my basic artistic morphology. On leaving, I crossed Piazza del Popolo, entering daily the church where two of the best-known Caravaggios are kept, and then again by bus, all the way home. And in the middle of this journey, among some of the wonders of Rome, there were the sculptures by Fausto Delle Chiaie. Small, allusive, they interacted with those majestic monuments. They were able to desecrate them or depart for stories of their own. I followed them along the way as one follows a path made of breadcrumbs. Every day, for twenty-five years, he placed his small sculptures around the fence of the mausoleum of Augustus, along the road to the hospital. They were sublime. And I fantasized. Those little artworks were able to make me travel».

An act of gratitude, his one, towards the public art that quenched his thirst, carrying the traits of reciprocation: his art flows in the middle of the street, gushing freely for anyone who is thirsty.
In Rome, for L’Hôtel sur la Lune (2011), it is a telescope made of discarded oil barrels, a reference to Le Voyage dans la Lune by Georges Méliès (1902) as an observation that there are no more Wests to conquer, placed in top of a former abandoned salami factory, upon request of the community in transit that lives there – to signal its presence to those who pretend it’s not there, to leap towards an elsewhere that has the features of a finally closer moon.
In Naples, for My dreams, they’ll never surrender (2014), it is an expanse of one hundred thousand ears of wheat nourished by a tin sun and placed in the most remote point of Castel Sant’Elmo, once used as a prison; a hundred thousand ears of wheat destined to become dry, like the thought of Gramsci imprisoned and then defused, unless the Italian state will decide to take care of it, finally taking care of itself.
In Calais, for the final chapter of the cycle Histoire et Destin – New Men’s Land (2016), it is a star fallen from the banner of Europe, an authentic golden ruin in the midst of dusty ruins, the sea behind them, in that strip of promised and failed land which was the Jungle, the first real city of the twenty f irst century, conceived by migrants and aborted by Europe.
In Scampia, for Elegia (2019), it is an enchantment of heterotopia in which to stumble inside the metro station, a domestic landscape where the paint on the walls peels off in a myriad of rose petals, in homage to the humanity, to the grace, to the kindness through which Neapolitans unconditionally welcomed him.

Unconditionally, freely, as access to art should be.
Unconditionally, freely, as access to water should be, marked by the sixth of the seventeen objectives that make up the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
There is a story by Raymond Carver – Cathedral, 1983 – in which a blind man asks a friend to make him understand how a cathedral is made, and he draws it for him, remarking the line and allowing him to feel the path of the pencil under his fingertips, so that it can be imagined.
But sometimes reality is even more powerful and imaginative than fiction: when Antoni Gaudí designed the Sagrada Familia cathedral he concentrated on just one of the four facades, sensing that time would have not been enough for him but never ceasing to think beyond his own limits. Gaudí imagined a forest of stone, columns like trees, and carried forward the project by fixing a wooden slab to the ceiling, to which he hooked small chains with counterweights at their ends, to understand its load and so that anyone could see the Cathedral even before it was real, looking up, like every time amazement invades us.
That Cathedral, imagined real even before being so and built thanks to this visionary impulse, is our UN 2030 Agenda.

But if the right to public water is made explicit within the Agenda, the fruition of art is increasingly a private, elitist and mediated fact, in the hands of a system that keeps it away from the street, at the mercy of merchandising, often forcing it to clandestinity, as Marcel Duchamp prophesied in a conference in Philadelphia in 1961: «The great artist of tomorrow will go underground». Sentimentally, just as sentimental has been the education of that child who stumbled upon art and innocently, unconsciously imbued himself with it, within the public/private dichotomy I then ask him what’s his relationship with his artworks, once donated to the public. What becomes of those thirsty ears of wheat, of those petals, of that shipwrecked meteor, of that trip to the moon? «Those works become part of a map», he replies. «A new map. Which gives meaning to the places, but above all to the passages. When they asked me, for example, to create a work for the Scampia subway, I thought of those years. I thought that every day so many kids would have caught those trains to go to school and would have passed in front of my work. Elegia was born with this awareness. And I designed it so that it would have been the reservoir of a thousand possible stories. An empty room, a few elements, perfect pieces of an inner drama that was just waiting to have a visual shore to start gushing. Sometimes I walk by that work and listen to people exchanging ideas about what they see in it. According to some it is the study of a contemporary St. Jerome, for others it is a prison, for still others it is a poor house. In each of these stories, the protagonist is the one who watches. Thus, there it is what becomes of these works. They are devices available to the public. The permanent ones, in addition, have a particular virtue: they are places to which one can return. That’s what people tell me. They never tell me: I wanted to see it again. They say: I wanted to go there again. Returning to a place and finding it still there is something that goes beyond a visual experience. It is the manifestation of a home of the soul. You know, I am honoured and happy when I have the opportunity to leave homes of the soul around, to which somebody can return».

It is a warming metaphor, the one just evoked by Tosatti of the work of art as a home of the soul, but in his art there is a more recurring metaphor, which does not warm, but indeed it burns: that of the mirror.
It is not only the title of one of his most demanding cycles, My heart is a void, the void is a mirror – which, since 2018, is taking him around the world to compose a decadent portrait of an idea of global democracy adrift, in the face of which it is binding and burning to be mirrored in order to be able to imagine a new way of salvation – but it is also the metaphor that Tosatti identifies for himself as an artist: that of a mirror-maker. «The artist has the task of planting a mirror in reality, sharp, like a razor open in the air». The synthetic soul of the mirror, synthetic because it is enclosed within the only synthesis of a frame, allows concentration on the crisis points identified by the artist to definitively, and once again, come to terms with ourselves.
But the function of the mirror – which in art must necessarily distance itself from pedestrian descriptions, from an inflated idea of the search for truth that we willingly leave to the chronicle because art is not, with all due respect, reportage – is that of a returnable: «The mirror-maker is not the one who constructs the image that is in the mirror, and what is important in the mirror is the image». And that reflection returned by art, the image, passes through «a process of knowledge and, subsequently, of sharing that knowledge, which requires an overcoming, a dialectic. And it’s not just me doing it, letting myself be invaded by the culture of a place, but the city itself does when I give back, like a wave of return, that entire heritage of knowledge put in a precise frequency, in an order similar to the atomic structure of a blade».

 

A metaphor is capable, as per its etymology – metaphor: derived from the Greek μεταφορά [-ᾶς, ἡ] 1. transport 2. change 3. transfer – of transporting like the sea, of evoking an elsewhere, like the imagination. Of creating powerful icons in front of which to collect and to be recollected, to reflect and to be reflected. By merging my metaphor of art as water with his one of art as mirror, I obtain a mirror of water, and I think that a founding myth of Western culture lives on a mirror of water, precisely that of Narcissus, who fatally fell in love with himself looking at his own image reflected in a mirror of water. Leon Battista Alberti (De Pictura, 1435) was the first to metaphorically recognize Narcissus, who loved nothing but an image, as the foster father of figurative art. On the wave of the centuries, the theme of the self-portrait is a loop in the history of art. The artist becomes a white canvas and actually a mirror, whose image to fall, and to make fall, in love with. After all, one of the watershed moments of the artist’s activity is what is called exhibition: the show of one’s own work and one’s own, naked, vision.

I have a thought: the one for which the artist is Narcissus, bent over the mirror of water of an urgency to share, and not just any narcissus, devoted to a liquid crystal black mirror capable of reflecting only its vacuity. However, a system of contemporary culture watered down by the politically correct is not able to look beyond the surface, it is not able to read Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carmelo Bene, it is not able to see that «A sword reflected in water takes the shape of a cross» (Giovanni Papini, The Devil, 1953), not failing to put Narcissus on the cross whenever given the opportunity.
I then ask him – in the trial constantly inflicted on Narcissus, and on Narcissus-Tosatti as an artist – to which words would he entrust his defense speech, but Gian Maria declares himself innocent for not having committed the crime, «because my reference is not Narcissus, but Dorian Gray. The portrait is the only mirror capable of showing the soul. And for this reason the portrait is the only weapon able to kill the monster inside us. I build mirrors that can show us our true face and make us want to change, murdering what is unbearable to us and about us. After all, that is what art is for: not to pacify us, but to set us on fire».
So I return a bit stubbornly to Narcissus, but only to broaden the scope by giving voice to the co protagonist of the myth, water, recovering Tosatti’s reference to Oscar Wilde because, in his poem The Disciple (1894), not only Narcissus mirrors himself in the water to enjoy his own beauty, but also water does, contemplating itself in the mirror of his eyes, itself becoming Narcissus. And beyond the satisfaction on both sides, «Water invented us to be admired», writes Alok Jha in The Water Book (2016).
In other words, beauty must be shared. And in this I totally agree with Gian Maria: not the graceful and lobotomized decorum, but that beauty which also makes the unheimliche, the uncanny, its own, not to pacify us, but to set us on fire.
That kind of beauty you struggle to sustain.
The unsustainable sustainability of art.
It’s time to talk with Gian Maria Tosatti about sustainability. Cornerstone of that Cathedral which is the UN 2030 Agenda, in a world that we have dangerously led astray, is the search for sustainability, the only response to the complexity of our time, systematized by Edgar Morin in his transdisciplinary and fluid Complexity Theory.

Certainties fall, and this is the only certainty that must lead us to dance, like stars generated by chaos.

Like water, which can always find a way to flow. According to the Complexity Theory, culture is the

trait through which human being emerges from nature, its mother, through a dynamic movement

that has been disjunction, but must necessarily switch into (re)conjunction. Human being to nature,

through culture: in Morin’s view the contribution of culture, and therefore of art, must bear the

features of this urgent paradigm shift.
In 2016, the essay Systems in art making and art theory: complex networks from the ashes of

Postmodernism by Philip Galanter, father of generative art, dealt with the definition of a complex

work of art: a work able to increase the awareness of the spectator, active part of the work, compared

to the sea of which we are but a sip. No longer an image, but an environment. No longer a drop, but

a torrent. No longer a tree but a forest, with its vital interactions, thriving on biodiversity. Living

artwork.

In feeling profoundly close to Gian Maria Tosatti in the war on rotting labels, I then free from the

critical field of these pages the idea that sustainability in art is equivalent to political correctness, and

I accept Galanter’s definition of complex or sustainable art in the sense of underlining, in words, what

art does by its very nature: to bring to light an urgency, present or imminent, through a vision, even

if it is ferocious – and there is no doubt that the Cathedral of the UN 2030 Agenda, is a florilegium of

emergencies, if we ask for salvation.

 

Following the metaphor of this path, if art is water, the artistic gesture is dowsing. «The artist has a role – whether it is moral or immoral, that is another matter. Kind of like the prophets of tragedy and epic: sometimes they are loved, sometimes fought, sometimes chained, still other times they manage to save someone’s fate. The artist is always a Tiresias, someone who knows not because he is an erudite, but because he can read within the vibrations of nature. Art is capable of telling us things a moment before they happen», Tosatti wrote.
«In complex systems, unpredictability and paradox are always present», Morin wrote, in Introduction to complex thinking (1993). We just spoke of unpredictability – or rather, of a form of prediction that cannot be attributed to the scientific method, but to a more powerful sensibility – by drawing the artist as Tiresias, or as a dowser. Here I come to paradox: I remember an episode of La fabbrica del mondo, a tv program aired in prime time in the first months of 2022, hosted by the playwright Marco Paolini and the philosopher of biology Telmo Pievani, dedicated precisely to the universal right to water. I remember Paolini’s monologue. In Italy, six million cubic meters of water are consumed every minute, 40% of which is lost due to a water network of five hundred thousand kilometres in poor maintenance, «but this doesn’t strike us, because it lacks an emotion».
Joints, gaskets, holes, illegal withdrawals; but without an emotion, hardly a board of directors will make water maintenance a priority. Yet water, as we know by now, is a precious and not infinite resource. There is a real danger that the appeals of scientists on global warming or on the acidification of the oceans – along with the Fridays for Future of a Generation Z who show an infinitely greater capacity for vision and sense of responsibility than the one owned by musty armchairs in button rooms – will remain white noise until our collective past, our myths, our imagination, and the artistic gesture, won’t be able to translate them into a powerful image, immersing raw data in the cultural heritage, to dress and invest them with an emotion.

So, following the trail of a recent editorial by Ludovico Pratesi on the relationship between contemporary art, Theory of Complexity and sustainability, I am thinking of Imitatio Christi by Roberto Cuoghi, one of the works through which the Italian Pavilion presented itself at the Venice Art Biennale in 2017: a factory of casts of Christ on the cross, a decomposing christificium where the stench of humidity invaded you, where, as Pratesi pointed out: «The artist relies on the generative force both of chance and of the disorder coming from decomposition, capable of generating iconic representations that change unpredictably over time, creating a dynamic and emerging iconographic field in which the viewer is immersed».
And I am thinking of Gian Maria Tosatti, of his history in art which leverages the visitor’s experience as an enzyme of the artwork – full aesthetic experience, where “aesthetics” supports its etymology of aísthesis, perception – and I am thinking in particular of his History of Nights and Destiny of Comets at the Italian Pavilion. The press kit, on this occasion made available, told us about a continuous forum to deepen the research on sustainable life and development models, whose reflections can be consulted at www.notteecomete.it/public-program; of a project consistent with the sustainability commitment of the Venice Biennale, which collects data relating to its emissions by compensating them economically, with the aim of achieving complete carbon neutrality by 2030; of an explicit reference to the UN Agenda, touching in art all the themes of the seventeen sustainability goals, including not just the universal right to water – having a leading role, flooding the large loading area in the final act of the work, allowing spectators and Venice itself, a submerged city, once again to be mirrored – but also those related to the protection of nature, to the sustainable development with respect to the territory, to the rethinking of ethical models of production, consumption and profit.

And beyond communication, above all, art stands. History of Night and Destiny of Comets is a total immersion in a space of two thousand square meters to be explored in solitude, re-emerging emotionally charged. It is a work with a theatrical syntax, evocative of the structure and function of Greek tragedy, whose first act is dedicated to the rise and fall of the Italian industrial dream – with his skilful pictorial interventions of gold and rust, gold as incorruptibility and rust as erosive corruption – whereas the second act, rippling water, darkness and the feeble, but still perceptible, glow of the f ireflies, represents the deflagration of the cathartic element, purification after an impervious journey, sign of a still possible peace that could redeem the warning of 1975 by Pasolini: «I’d give the whole Montedison for a firefly». Here they are, fireflies, again; nevertheless, good care must be taken.
In a recent interview for Flash Art, Tosatti was asked what the dimension of hope in art consisted of. I quote his words verbatim: «For me it is in tears, the ones I have collected from the visitors to this Pavilion. From these testimonies you can realize that the game is not over, that we are still capable of getting touched, because these things make our blood burn in our veins. I think that, in order to keep hoping, it suffices to note all this, our ability to still be alive, to vibrate, to still tremble».

Tears, 98.2% water. That kind of necessary emotion that Paolini spoke of, to raise awareness of the universal right to water and, more generally, of the urgencies implemented by the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Here it is, the function of art in support of rights. And here it is, in my opinion, the ever-present paradox within the complexity of our times, applied to art and sustainability: beyond the form, in order to be sustainable art must be emotionally unsustainable. It must shake from within, like a crucifix corrupted by mold, like Salò or the 120 days of Sodom. It has been unsustainable for me, therefore vivifying, Gian Maria Tosatti’s care in filling with gold leaf each single hole in a wall riddled with bullets, in the sixth episode of the Seven Seasons of the Spirit. It has been unsustainable for me, therefore vivifying, to look at the drawing of his project for the construction of a rainbow twenty meters high and fifty meters wide in Calais – a rainbow, physically water and light, meta/physically eternal symbol of a new alliance – and to think of the powerful beauty that could have happened, if only priority would have been given to humanity.

And when I ask him to mention three artworks that have been emotionally unsustainable (= finally sustainable) for him, Gian Maria overwhelms every barrier: «Three… no, it’s not possible to mention just three of them. Not later than a few weeks ago, Lucrezia Longobardi and I have been astonished for an incalculable time looking at a painting that we know very well: La Chambre de Van Gogh à Arles. And the same can be said of many others. The monologue of the rabbit at the end of the first act of Orestea by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Othello by Eimuntas Nekrošius, the silent dialogue between the two protagonists of Čechov’s Ivanov invented from scratch by Tamás Ascher, every single Madonna by Vincenzo Bellini, Verdi’s La Traviata with Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón, John Huston’s Escape to Victory, Charlie Chaplin’s gaze at the urchins who taunt him just before the last scene of City Lights. Eduardo De Filippo on stage, looking like he’s been there since Aeschylus. The suburbs by Sironi or A Christmas at the Pio Albergo Trivulzio by Angelo Morbelli, Elisa by Arcangelo Sassolino, a work by Mondrian at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and then The Death of the Virgin by Caravaggio, De Chirico until all the 1920s, Mahler’s Second Symphony staged by Romeo Castellucci in Aix-en-Provence in 2022 while the corpses of war were being dug up in the woods of Ukraine, Captain America clutching his shattered shield at the end of Avengers: Endgame, the Rape of Proserpina by Bernini, the lithographs by Odilon Redon, the protagonists of The man without qualities by Musil playing the piano together because they were no longer able to speak to each other, the final dance by Pippo Delbono in This fierce darkness, Dostoevsky’s letter written a few hours before his fortunately suspended execution, Naples according to Anna Maria Ortese,Pasolini and Tarkowsky’s cinema, Totò and Fabrizi’s one, De Sica’s one… There are too many, too many things, too much beauty», he tells me, and I realize once again how much an artist, beyond fame, beyond recognition, is forever blessed and condemned to a constant thirst for art.
«One should be able to live a hundred times, in order to be able to hold all this in one’s own fingers, having the time to be delighted. And I hope my colorful birds flying into the white cathedral perched atop a tall Neapolitan stairway, my Cape Town apartment littered with half-empty water glasses and human teeth, my late night where, on a dark sea, a swarm of fireflies floats, may be in someone’s infinite list – or, at least, in the list of the people who had the venture to create those works together with me».

Those traveling companions whom Gian Maria Tosatti, captain of fortune of his very personal story (as in that wonderful song by Gabriella Ferri, back to excruciating beauty: ognuno ha tanta storia, tante facce nella memoria, tanto di tutto, tanto di niente, le parole di tanta gente… – transl. everyone has so much history, so many faces in memory, so much of everything, so much of nothing, the words of so many people…), has never failed to pay homage and gratitude to; which is anything but obvious, in times gradually become more and more complex, more and more discomposed and atomised, more and more liquid. «Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of liquid modernity», wrote the prophet Zygmunt Bauman more than twenty years ago baptizing the most pertinent feature of the time within which we sail by sight: that of liquidity. And in order to immediately understand the paradigm of liquid modernity, for me there is nothing better than comparing Zygmunt Bauman to hip hop.

 

New York, Bronx, 1980s. The hip hop counterculture emerges to denounce, through an almost complete style cluster, the invisibility to which (re)segregation had relegated thousands of young African Americans, who grew up in suburban areas abandoned to themselves. The axis around which it rotates is, in one word, the flow, the hip-hopper’s ability to create a liquid continuity starting from a series of fragments: the DJ, mixing the breaks and inserting the most heterogeneous samplings as if in a unicum; the writer, fitting the letters of the tag one inside the other; the breakdancer, gliding into a dynamic of syncopated gestures which then flow smoothly; the rapper, applying metric and tonal schemes in a cadence that deconstructs the language and the power relations encrusted within it, turning it into its own unequivocal style. Its own flow.

 

In Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (1995), Russell A. Potter wrote: «The hip hop triad made up of graffiti, dance and rap consists of post-apocalyptic arts by definition, scratching the decaying walls of post-industrial urban America. If analogous moments in the chronologies of European art exist, they are to be found in the prison dementia of Piranesi’s Rome, or in the situationist juxtapositions of Debord’s Paris. The time of hip hop is post-apocalyptic and its proscenium is the Society of the Spectacle, in which the definitive form of commodification is that of the spectacularized image. Hip hop aspires to a disjointed world, which fractures the fragmented, graffiti by graffiti».

And here it is, in the name of that liquid modernity that characterizes the contemporary, the abandonment of that kind of totality typical of Fluxus in favor of the more atomized liquidity of flow.

Flow as movement, and as migratory flows: not surprisingly, ours has been defined as the century of exile. As a Napòlide – the definition that Erri De Luca coined for himself (crasis of the words Napoletano + apolide, meaning Neapolitan + stateless) also seems perfect for Gian Maria Tosatti – that of migrations is a flow that has seen him immersed several times, as an artist and as a man, from The Kingdoms of Hunger (2013), teeth scattered like contemporary fossils in a Mole Vanvitelliana like Mare Nostrum, to Histoire et Destin in the Jungle of Calais, on whose beach the ideal of a new alliance was shipwrecked.

Flow as language, scheme of power within which all humanity immerses itself, from «Water is the principle of all things» (Thales of Miletus, VII-VI century BC) to «In the beginning was the Word» (John 1:1). My heart is a void, the void is a mirror is the English translation of the official title of his project, לגיפּש ַא יוו קידייל זיא ץרַאה ן ַ יימ, which is in Yiddish. The reason for this choice derives from the observation of the importance of language in structuring a society, and Yiddish, according to the Nobel Prize winner for literature Isaac B. Singer in 1978, is the language of naked souls, «a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics; the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity». Conversely, the philologist Victor Klemperer, in The language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii (1947), noted how «Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously». Because if some words flow like water, others do like arsenic.
Flow like time, made of fluxes and refluxes, like history for Vico, like waves in the sea. Yet there is a time, that of art, which must necessarily operate on the scale of eternity, because art can never be a snapshot done for a trend topic. In this sense Caravaggio is absolutely contemporary. In this sense, Gian Maria Tosatti’s installations are out of time, crystallized and crystalline like the zero degree of water, post-apocalyptic and purgatorial like the Zone in Stalker (Andrej Tarkovsky, 1979). Like the Odessa Episode of My heart is a void, the void is a mirror (2020), eight street lamps lit and watered by the nuclear energy of nearby Chernobyl on a lake, that of Kuyalnik, whose water is seamless with the sky. «I have been making works on the future for years and people see the past in them. It’s fantastic. This speaks volumes about the links between the future and the past. I believe that there is a fundamental error in our way of looking at time. We relate to the concepts of past, present and future with the parameters of extremely narrow perspective creatures. One life for us is an imposing measure. But in absolute time it is nothing», declared Tosatti in a recent interview. Art immersed in an absolute time, as absolute is the time of water.
Flow as current. If the time of art must be absolute, it is in currents that the time of its history is punctuated; and if Tosatti as an artist is called to operate on the scale of eternity, Tosatti as an intellectual analyzes the present and the past also in order to be able to read the future. However, in liquid modernity, even art is affected by its connoting trait of fragmentation, atomisation, driven individualism, to the point that in Italy the latest historical currents of contemporary art come to a halt in the second half of the last century: the current of Poor Art theorised by Germano Celant in the Sixties, and that of Transavantgarde theorised by Achille Bonito Oliva in the immediately following decade.

 

Then, silence; or rather, a generation of remarkable but lonely artists. Yet water is made of drops, which probably would not join together – and in their own molecular interactions – without the direction of what we suggestively call the memory of water, which indeed is its electromagnetic f ield. It makes me think, on the trail of the metaphor between art and water, that what is missing is not art, but a direction that makes it flow into a current. At least until now, because the stature of an intellectual – who was certainly not chosen by divine investiture as artistic director of the quadrennial – also, and above all, depends on his ability to know how to read the context. I then ask him, as I would ask ABO of the Transavantgarde, what are the critical traits and artists that flow into the current, which he identified, of Visual Neorealism: «I think I can say that Lucrezia Longobardi, in a fine recent book entitled 15 hypotheses for a history of contemporary art, goes much deeper than I did in theorizing the network of bonds that holds together that generation of artists for whom I invented that denomination. And there is a passage from that book that sometimes comes to my mind and, if you allow me, I quote it literally: “Perhaps this is the primacy that must be recognized to the Italian art of the Tens over the neo-avantgardes and post-avantgardes of the second half of the twentieth century. Its existence is not due to a critical reading of the approach, but rather to a real poetic convergence. The art of the 1910s in Italy exists by virtue of a coherence that can be found in practice, and not in intentions. It exists by virtue of a coherence that has had no need for guardians and theorists. The art of the 1910s has been an orphan art, raised on the street, without fathers or educators. It is an art born of no one, and therefore, up to now, recognized by no one in its entirety as a phenomenon. This is probably the reason for the critical silence that has enfolded it (beyond the already mentioned thousand monographs, sometimes commissioned and paid by those ones directly involved). But, for this reason, it is a stronger, more robust art and, perhaps, more capable of leaving deep traces, which can also have an impact on the following decades”».
«For this reason – counters Tosatti in a gentle but firm way – I contest the idea that a director is needed. The idea that art can be directed is a bluff. Even Celant is a much bigger myth than the man behind it. Instead, I believe that a critical generation is needed, as strong as the artistic one, to find the right balance in which everything can proliferate. At the time of Poor Art – and of the many other things that were happening at that time – there still was this balance. That is the secret».

 

It is as if, in liquid modernity, that of being mavericks, flows in a current, were a precise stylistic feature attributable to the individual artists who populate it, and as if they – having become aware of their being nobody’s children – could feel even freer to explore, with a certain sense of bright spleen, their condition of fluctuating identities. «If the modern problem of identity was how to construct an identity, the postmodern problem of identity is how to avoid fixation and keep the options open», wrote Zygmunt Bauman, according to whom being postmodern is also equivalent to being in progress, and in liquid modernity «Change is the only permanence and uncertainty the only certainty». This means that the search for identity in the postmodern is not only imaginable but also desirable, that its fixity is simply limiting and that, given an uncertain future, a great plastic capacity is needed more than ever.

 

Just as it happens with water. The changes in state of water allow its shifting from solid to liquid to gaseous, and mutation is also the principal theme of the main exhibition of the just concluded Venice Art Biennale, or also of the philosophical thematization by Paul B. Preciado. «Art is transgender by definition», Tosatti glimpsed and wrote in an editorial dating back almost fifteen years ago.
Between biologic and bionic, between identity and fluidity, between organic and synthetic, carnal and aquatic, opening new scenarios also to the liquid, amphibious ultra-reality of the metaverse. «Much of the metaverse depends on what we are capable of doing within the reality we are physically living. If we don’t build good citizens within the physical reality, we will have barbarians within the metaverse as well. Different dimensions, in which the same responsibilities operate. We also see it in social media, a light metaverse full of hate, more than the one actually present in reality. We need to make sure that the places we are in may not primarily be safe, but rather sustainable places. The metaverse has many resources for all things related to identity issues. In reality it is possible to intervene on a sexual level, but if someone feels like a dolphin, is there any possible solution? Within metaverse, you can be a dolphin. Projection into digital reality further helps to overcome physical limitations. Art can play a role in this trans-dimensional scenario», he said recently. So I ask him which form he’d choose for himself, in the liquid realm of the metaverse: «It’s twenty years now that I am in the metaverse», he tells me. «That’s what all the works I’ve spread around the world are. And my form is the invisible one of the architect».

 

The very personal form I would give to Gian Maria Tosatti, in the fluid microcosm of the metaverse, partially supports his answer: Tosatti is for me that Lucifer that he himself made the protagonist of the third episode of his Seven Seasons of the Spirit, at the former general warehouses of the port of Naples. A Lucifer very similar to the Greek myth of Prometheus, so in love with humankind that he dared to rebel against God. A Lucifer as a sequel to the sacred narrative, set in a domestic environment where on the first floor water is boiling in the pot and walls are weeping, grounded for eternity in a gilded chamber with an aerosol, a book by Jules Verne and a notebook where to write and rewrite his own mistake. A Lucifer now aware of his flaw made believing he was doing good, outlined by Tosatti with indulgence and a certain kind of tenderness, because absolute evil for him does not lie in error, but in inertia. «Not: I am a fallen man, but: I am a man, and I am falling», wrote Harold Bloom referring precisely to Lucifer in The Anxiety of Influence (1973).
I am reminded of the opening and closing sentence in Mathieu Kassowitz’s La haine (1995): «It’s about a guy who falls off a skyscraper. On his way down past each floor, he keeps telling himself, “So far so good”, “So far so good”, “So far so good”. But it’s not how far you fall that matters. It’s how you land». The fall, the mistake, do not have a definitive feature if we have the strength to become aware of them, so as to consciously fix them. Creating art itself is never an innocent act, nor a winning one. It is necessary to make mistakes in order to grow, it is necessary to know how to see the gold in a failure – as Pasolini warned or, returning to water, as Erasmo did within the Adagia (1508): «When I made a shipwreck, then I sailed well».

 

We believed that man was omnipotent. We were wrong. We can still fix it.
We believed that water was unlimited and its flowing immutable, and instead the acceleration of its cycle, driven mad by our delirium, is the cause of the extreme phenomena that are plaguing us and devastating the planet. We were wrong. We can still fix it.
«Everything has limits», Gian Maria tells me. «Today, on the street, I was listening to an old song by Capossela. I would have liked to call him to tell him he’s right. We artists are generals of armies made of lead soldiers. And it doesn’t matter if they can be animated. They are still figurines. But they do have a hold on imagination. And so, for that part of us that still remains innocent, those battles of ours made with a little color and two hinted strokes can produce wounds in the armour, from which it is possible to extract our heart again to expose it to all the winds, to get it back to breathe. Because life can elude us. But art will always come looking for us».