79 wrote: «The hip hop triad made up of graffiti, dance and rap consists of post-apocalyptic arts by definition, scratching the decaying walls of post-industrial urban America. If analogous moments in the chronologies of European art exist, they are to be found in the prison dementia of Piranesi's Rome, or in the situationist juxtapositions of Debord's Paris. The time of hip hop is post-apocalyptic and its proscenium is the Society of the Spectacle, in which the definitive form of commodification is that of the spectacularized image. Hip hop aspires to a disjointed world, which fractures the fragmented, graffiti by graffiti». And here it is, in the name of that liquid modernity that characterizes the contemporary, the abandonment of that kind of totality typical of Fluxus in favor of the more atomized liquidity of flow. Flow as movement, and as migratory flows: not surprisingly, ours has been defined as the century of exile. As a Napòlide – the definition that Erri De Luca coined for himself (crasis of the words Napoletano + apolide, meaning Neapolitan + stateless) also seems perfect for Gian Maria Tosatti – that of migrations is a flow that has seen him immersed several times, as an artist and as a man, from The Kingdoms of Hunger (2013), teeth scattered like contemporary fossils in a Mole Vanvitelliana like Mare Nostrum, to Histoire et Destin in the Jungle of Calais, on whose beach the ideal of a new alliance was shipwrecked. Flow as language, scheme of power within which all humanity immerses itself, from «Water is the principle of all things» (Thales of Miletus, VII-VI century BC) to «In the beginning was the Word» (John 1:1). My heart is a void, the void is a mirror is the English translation of the official title of his project, מייַן האַרץ איז ליידיק ווי א ש ּפיגל, which is in Yiddish. The reason for this choice derives from the observation of the importance of language in structuring a society, and Yiddish, according to the Nobel Prize winner for literature Isaac B. Singer in 1978, is the language of naked souls, «a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics; the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity». Conversely, the philologist Victor Klemperer, in The language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii (1947), noted how «Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously». Because if some words flow like water, others do like arsenic. Flow like time, made of fluxes and refluxes, like history for Vico, like waves in the sea. Yet there is a time, that of art, which must necessarily operate on the scale of eternity, because art can never be a snapshot done for a trend topic. In this sense Caravaggio is absolutely contemporary. In this sense, Gian Maria Tosatti's installations are out of time, crystallized and crystalline like the zero degree of water, post-apocalyptic and purgatorial like the Zone in Stalker (Andrej Tarkovsky, 1979). Like the Odessa Episode of My heart is a void, the void is a mirror (2020), eight street lamps lit and watered by the nuclear energy of nearby Chernobyl on a lake, that of Kuyalnik, whose water is seamless with the sky. «I have been making works on the future for years and people see the past in them. It’s fantastic. This speaks volumes about the links between the future and the past. I believe that there is a fundamental error in our way of looking at time. We relate to the concepts of past, present and future with the parameters of extremely narrow perspective creatures. One life for us is an imposing measure. But in absolute time it is nothing», declared Tosatti in a recent interview. Art immersed in an absolute time, as absolute is the time of water. Flow as current. If the time of art must be absolute, it is in currents that the time of its history is punctuated; and if Tosatti as an artist is called to operate on the scale of eternity, Tosatti as an intellectual analyzes the present and the past also in order to be able to read the future. However, in liquid modernity, even art is affected by its connoting trait of fragmentation, atomisation, driven individualism, to the point that in Italy the latest historical currents of contemporary art come to a halt in the second half of the last century: the current of Poor Art theorised by Germano Celant in the Sixties, and that of Transavantgarde theorised by Achille Bonito Oliva in the immediately following decade. Then, silence; or rather, a generation of remarkable but lonely artists. Yet water is made of drops, which probably would not join together – and in their own molecular interactions – without the direction of what we suggestively call the memory of water, which indeed is its electromagnetic field. It makes me think, on the trail of the metaphor between art and water, that what is missing is not art, but a direction that makes it flow into a current. At least until now, because the stature of an intellectual – who was certainly not chosen by divine investiture as artistic director of the �uadrennial – also, and above all, depends on his ability to know how to read the context. I then ask him, as I would ask ABO of the Transavantgarde, what are the critical traits and artists that flow into the current, which he identified, of Visual Neorealism: «I think I can say that Lucrezia Longobardi, in a fine recent book entitled 15 hypotheses for a history of contemporary art, goes much deeper
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