63 Tosatti answered the double call from the Biennale and the �uadrennial – 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». H2O, 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 structure, 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 �uadrennial. 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.
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