78 beyond the form, in order to be sustainable art must be emotionally unsustainable. It must shake from within, like a crucifix corrupted by mold, like Salò or the 120 days of Sodom. It has been unsustainable for me, therefore vivifying, Gian Maria Tosatti's care in filling with gold leaf each single hole in a wall riddled with bullets, in the sixth episode of the Seven Seasons of the Spirit. It has been unsustainable for me, therefore vivifying, to look at the drawing of his project for the construction of a rainbow twenty meters high and fifty meters wide in Calais – a rainbow, physically water and light, meta/physically eternal symbol of a new alliance – and to think of the powerful beauty that could have happened, if only priority would have been given to humanity. And when I ask him to mention three artworks that have been emotionally unsustainable (= finally sustainable) for him, Gian Maria overwhelms every barrier: «Three… no, it's not possible to mention just three of them. Not later than a few weeks ago, Lucrezia Longobardi and I have been astonished for an incalculable time looking at a painting that we know very well: La Chambre de Van Gogh à Arles. And the same can be said of many others. The monologue of the rabbit at the end of the first act of Orestea by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Othello by Eimuntas Nekrošius, the silent dialogue between the two protagonists of Čechov's Ivanov invented from scratch by Tamás Ascher, every single Madonna by Vincenzo Bellini, Verdi's La Traviata with Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón, John Huston's Escape to Victory, Charlie Chaplin's gaze at the urchins who taunt him just before the last scene of City Lights. Eduardo De Filippo on stage, looking like he's been there since Aeschylus. The suburbs by Sironi or A Christmas at the Pio Albergo Trivulzio by Angelo Morbelli, Elisa by Arcangelo Sassolino, a work by Mondrian at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and then The Death of the Virgin by Caravaggio, De Chirico until all the 1920s, Mahler's Second Symphony staged by Romeo Castellucci in Aix-en-Provence in 2022 while the corpses of war were being dug up in the woods of Ukraine, Captain America clutching his shattered shield at the end of Avengers: Endgame, the Rape of Proserpina by Bernini, the lithographs by Odilon Redon, the protagonists of The man without qualities by Musil playing the piano together because they were no longer able to speak to each other, the final dance by Pippo Delbono in This fierce darkness, Dostoevsky's letter written a few hours before his fortunately suspended execution, Naples according to Anna Maria Ortese,Pasolini and Tarkowsky's cinema, Totò and Fabrizi's one, De Sica's one… There are too many, too many things, too much beauty», he tells me, and I realize once again how much an artist, beyond fame, beyond recognition, is forever blessed and condemned to a constant thirst for art. «One should be able to live a hundred times, in order to be able to hold all this in one's own fingers, having the time to be delighted. And I hope my colorful birds flying into the white cathedral perched atop a tall Neapolitan stairway, my Cape Town apartment littered with half-empty water glasses and human teeth, my late night where, on a dark sea, a swarm of fireflies floats, may be in someone's infinite list – or, at least, in the list of the people who had the venture to create those works together with me». Those traveling companions whom Gian Maria Tosatti, captain of fortune of his very personal story (as in that wonderful song by Gabriella Ferri, back to excruciating beauty: ognuno ha tanta storia, tante facce nella memoria, tanto di tutto, tanto di niente, le parole di tanta gente… – transl. everyone has so much history, so many faces in memory, so much of everything, so much of nothing, the words of so many people…), has never failed to pay homage and gratitude to; which is anything but obvious, in times gradually become more and more complex, more and more discomposed and atomised, more and more liquid. «Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of liquid modernity», wrote the prophet Zygmunt Bauman more than twenty years ago baptizing the most pertinent feature of the time within which we sail by sight: that of liquidity. And in order to immediately understand the paradigm of liquid modernity, for me there is nothing better than comparing Zygmunt Bauman to hip hop. New York, Bronx, 1980s. The hip hop counterculture emerges to denounce, through an almost complete style cluster, the invisibility to which (re)segregation had relegated thousands of young African Americans, who grew up in suburban areas abandoned to themselves. The axis around which it rotates is, in one word, the flow, the hip-hopper's ability to create a liquid continuity starting from a series of fragments: the DJ, mixing the breaks and inserting the most heterogeneous samplings as if in a unicum; the writer, fitting the letters of the tag one inside the other; the breakdancer, gliding into a dynamic of syncopated gestures which then flow smoothly; the rapper, applying metric and tonal schemes in a cadence that deconstructs the language and the power relations encrusted within it, turning it into its own unequivocal style. Its own flow. In Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (1995), Russell A. Potter
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUzNDc=