68 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 flowed 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 flow 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
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