62 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 strongest, «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, quenches his thirst: «Sometimes being thirsty is a foretaste of the water that will quench our thirst. That is what �uadrennial 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 �uadrennial, 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, H2O, two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.
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