Viola and Tosatti: from Madre to the Venice Biennale
There is a beautiful piece of Naples in the Italian Pavilion of the 59th International Art Exhibition in Venice (from April 23 to November 27).
And not just because the curator is Eugenio ViolaNeapolitan flew to Bogotá, e Gian Maria TosattiNeapolitan by adoption, but because their collaboration was born at the Madre, the reference Museum for the Contemporary in the city.
Many will remember Seven Seasons of the Spirit: a real curatorial saga that lasted three years and culminated in 2016 with a one-of-a-kind exhibition. On that monumental occasion, seven places in Naples were reopened, abandoned by the Second World War or by the earthquake of 80.
Retracing a series of “interrupted transits”, precisely in his city, Viola has imagined for the Italian Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022 a project characterized by a theatrical narration that stages the uncertainty of the present, with a prophetic register.
«The Story of the Night», from the rise to the subsequent decline of the “Italian miracle” of the 1960s: a country that has betrayed itself due to the mirage of industrial development that has never actually been realized. And «The fate of the comets», that is, wandering in the cosmos until slowly extinguished like candles.
The final vision, however, turns into a possible epiphany, practicing optimism as an ethical necessity; a light at the end of the tunnel, after an experiential journey.
A single environmental installation of 2000 square meters that looks to the future with hope. Because, Tosatti affirms, quoting Anna Maria Ortese: «Designing a way out of the dark is an iron duty».
“The critical issues of the present are used in a preparatory way to face the challenges of the future”, explains Viola.
A total work that blends a plurality of languages, as often happens in the eclecticism of Viola and Tosatti: from literary references to visual arts, from theater to music and performance. The whole path is supported by literary references, first of all Pasolini and his nostalgia for fireflies combined with the denunciation of a power vacuum: an aesthetic reading of the precarious balance between man and nature, between sustainable development and territory, between ethics and profit . Thanks to his theatrical training in the performative field between Warsaw and Pontedera Tosatti has the ability to shape and re-semantize spaces. Not simple environmental installations but complex devices that incorporate different suggestions.
The social role of the contemporary is an essential element of the search for viola, which likes to define itself as an “artivist”.
«Art and politics find themselves in an antithetical and complementary position. One project when you arrived with the work, one more show when you arrived. Politics must give solutions, answers, art stimulates reflection. It does not have the power to change reality, but rather a maieutic function, a transformative power to awaken consciousness. Especially in an era like ours marked by extremisms that are rekindled at all levels of intolerance between genders, ethnic groups, religions, art must guarantee the coexistence of every possible difference “.
Viola has been around the world: Chief Curator of Mambo, the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá, since 2019, after two years as Senior Curator of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (Pica) in Australia, today he returns to his homeland as a true outsider. You live your assignment at the Biennale with great critical responsibility towards our historical present, but also with a sense of revenge, because after more than five years you are enabled to express yourself in his country of hers.