Gian Maria Tosatti is an artist one hears more than sees. His level of activity and energy is such that he rarely stands still, yet wherever he goes he strongly vocalises his thoughts on subjects ranging from activism, to regional and local politics, to religion. Thankfully, these thoughts are erudite and relevant to the worldwide contemporary social discourse. Indeed, within an artworld increasingly given over to pithy irony, ‘crapstraction’, ‘flipping’ and the cult of celebrity, it is refreshing to encounter someone who takes things quite as seriously as Tosatti does. My Dreams They’ll Never Surrender (2014), a permanent installation situated in the heavily fortified Castel Sant’Elmo, a Neopolitan castle that was for centuries used as a prison and which rises above the entire city, features a cornfield that must be constantly replenished by the people of Naples. The work is dedicated to those political prisoners – such as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi – who have found the strength to change the world from behind bars.
My Dreams They’ll Never Surrender was realised alongside his ongoing project Sette Stagione dello Spirito (Seven Seasons of the Spirit, 2013–), which will comprise seven shows in total by its end. The third of these shows, Lucifero – dedicated to Lucifer – opens at the port of Naples in March and will coincide with the final months of the project – The Kingdoms of Hunger – in Lampedusa, the forlorn Italian island whose hapless residents do their best to welcome incoming waves of immigrants arriving by boat; emaciated, desperate and sometimes dead. The work, begun during the 2013 Mediterranean Biennale in Acona, will take the form of a sacrarium, developed in consultation with the local community, in which Lampedusa’s traumatised inhabitants, who find themselves filling the gap left by inadequate government provision but often seek psychologically to distance themselves from the ongoing tragedy off their shores, will be able to pray and meditate, and hopefully find some small consolation amid one of the great humanitarian crises of our times.
Indeed, both the dedication of his approach and the modality in which he works, generally relying on the use of raw readymade materials, make Tosatti appear like a character out of time: a political orator plucked from the drawing rooms of nineteenth-century Europe and schooled in conceptualism before being left in Naples – where he has been in long-term residence with Fondazione Morra since 2013 – to ponder life in twenty-first-century Italy. It is this longed-for seriousness – in an age sadly given over to banal and fleeting reflections – that has seen Tosatti collecting accolades over the last year while signing to Galleria Lia Rumma. The honourable mention he received from the international jury of the Premio Furla (Italy’s most prestigious prize for young artists) will result in a residence in the studio of Vanessa Beecroft in 2016. In the coming years Tosatti is as unlikely to slow down as the world’s problems are likely to be resolved.
Since postgraduate research into the interplay between art and architecture, onetime newspaper editor Gian Maria Tosatti has produced work on a large scale, notably a series of projects that spread through the spaces of cities over a period of years. This son of Rome currently finds himself in Naples working on his wide-ranging Sette Stagione dello Spirito during a two-year residency at Fondazione Morra. Selected by Mike Watson, theorist and critic, Rome.
Read all of our 2015 FutureGreats profiles
This article was first published in the March 2015 issue.
