The other coast referenced in the title of the ongoing exhibition at the Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica, “L’altre costat,” is one accessible by venturing towards the boundary between reality and other dimensions, both physical and metaphysical. It transcends the rigid binary categories we are accustomed to, promoting a transformative journey towards the unknown and the desired. Within the immersive project conceived by Ferran Utzet and Enric Puig Punyet, space is given to the reconstruction of the Cape Town Episode, an environmental installation by Gian Maria Tosatti, part of the cycle My Heart is a Void, the Void is Mirror. The body of work composing this cycle is the result of a long and heartfelt journey through Europe and the crisis that democracy is experiencing there, crystallized into on-site meditations produced by the artist’s immersion in the social and urban fabric of the host cities. The Cape Town Episode, originating in the only city outside European borders involved by Tosatti, invites us to actively experience the melancholy of a place where people live the tangible consequences of the dissolution of democracy, which is neither hypothetical nor marginal, but profoundly real.
Gian Maria Tosatti, “My hart is so leeg soos ‘n spieël – Kaapstad episode”, view of the exhibition at Center d’Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona. Photographs by Jordi Play. Courtesy the artist
We enter alone, one at a time, but the company of the materialised absence – or our own burden – never leaves us. Crossing the threshold of the only door that can be opened, among the three overlooking the antechamber of the Cape Town Episode – adorned with a Kentia, a tropical palm tree, resting on an abysmally black and reflective Marquina marble floor – I find myself in an intimate and familiar space. A long corridor in semi-darkness and other doors, more humble than the previous ones, suggest that the boundary between one room and another has become fragile, in a dwelling whose boundaries have now been overcome. Two interconnected rooms make up the skeleton around which a feeling takes form. Scattered around the 1970s furniture – a single bed, a wooden bedside table, an iron desk, two padded and three wooden chairs, a leather sofa, a floor lamp and two furnishings, on which rest a fan and a record player – intense and personal conjectures unfold. In this place that I walk through for the first time, I recognise the signs of a past partner, the memories of the emotional punches we threw at each other and the teeth we knocked out, the tears shed and preserved so as not to forget them – to get better. Opaque images and incomprehensible sounds, in mirrors, in newspapers and on a switched-on television, as well as the reminiscences of something that is no longer there must become, at least temporarily, in order to heal.
Gian Maria Tosatti, “My hart is so leeg soos ‘n spieël – Kaapstad episode”, view of the exhibition at Center d’Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona. Photographs by Jordi Play. Courtesy the artist
This description, exceptionally written in the first person, primarily recounts the experience provoked by a complex performative device that, as Gian Maria Tosatti himself states, must give you the feeling of being completely free. Therefore, we are not talking about an illusory room for maneuver that the artist seeks to grant us, but about the real conditions for highlighting an inner displacement. A subjective discrepancy dependent, in each one, on a different trauma, through which in this open work it is possible to imagine new forms, without limiting oneself to the completion of the one predisposed or its mere observation. Even more in these circumstances, a group exhibition in Barcelona, in which for the first time an environmental installation conceived for a living, inhabited, consumed place, such as the building that housed it in Cape Town in 2019, is reconstructed in a museum context.
Gian Maria Tosatti, “My hart is so leeg soos ‘n spieël – Kaapstad episode”, view of the exhibition at Center d’Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona. Photographs by Jordi Play. Courtesy the artist
Beyond the sentimental reading that may arise from the opening of this work, Kaapstad episode and the entire cycle to which it belongs, My Heart is a Void, the Void is a Mirror, originate from a precise political question. Catania, Riga, Cape Town, Odessa and Istanbul are the stages of a meditative journey around the crisis of democracy that Europe has been experiencing for some time now. Two factors support the depth of these reflections: the first is that Tosatti begins this cycle in 2018, after a period spent in the United States, during which he experiences an external – and as such favoured – point of view on the old continent that he would later tell us about; the second, the choice of the Cape Town Episode to be rebuilt in Catalonia. South Africa mirrors the most negative instances of the European continent. Africa reflects most of its problems, being its dumping ground, a place where the waste of an imposing and consumerist society finds its place, filling the voids left by the exploitation of resources with its own sins. Emptiness that Tosatti perceives since his arrival in the South African capital, on the occasion of a residency at the A4 Arts Foundation, the emptiness that an inextinguishable thirst would cause in one’s chest and stomach.
Gian Maria Tosatti, “My hart is so leeg soos ‘n spieël – Kaapstad episode”, view of the exhibition at Center d’Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona. Photographs by Jordi Play. Courtesy the artist
Finding a link between Cape Town and Barcelona is simple; this bond unravels through the seas, through which all the port cities of the cycle are connected – places of landing and departure, from which one can prospectively observe what they leave behind – united by the suffering, sloth and remorse generated by fascisms.
Mattia Caggiano
Info:
AA.VV. L’altre costat
29/02/2024 – 02/06/2024
curated by Ferran Utzet, Enric Puig Punyet
Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica
La Rambla, 7 – 08002 Barcelona
https://artssantamonica.gencat.cat/en/
Mattia Caggiano (Asti, 1999) is a young art critic and theorist, currently based in Venice and Torino. His work focuses on themes related to environmental installation and the interaction between the artwork and its surrounding context. Through an approach rich in disciplinary crossovers, he explores the aesthetic dynamics and dialogues that emerge between art, environment, and experience, contributing to a deeper understanding of the contemporary landscape via long-term research presented in essays and publications.
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