70 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 �uinta 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 twentyfirst 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.
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