69 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 reelto-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
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