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Curator's text José-Carlos Mariátegui, 2001

Toti a América / América a Toti. A selection of works of Gianni Toti related to America

How can we speak about Courage? How can we speak about frightening? Not with modisms, but with gestures, with actions, the thought that re-evolves in every neuron, in every single synapses. From the Song to the Cry. We will not sing more, we will cry, from the Castle at Montbéliard to the castles of LatinAmerIndia. [1] Gianni Toti

Considered the "father" of video poetry, Gianni Toti is one of the most interesting and experimental video artists of today’s international scene. It’s difficult to consider Toti a media artist: his experience as a poet, film maker, theater writer, journalist, among many other intellectual and artistic participations, took him beyond the esthetics of the image. He questions and criticizes the image as a mere tool to represent the world and he argues that an image is instead something that is created by the confrontation of man and society. Toti began to work with video since the early 80’s, defining himself as a "poetronic", a creator that challenges theoretical thinking and cultural action in his insatiable search for new languages in the artistic and scientific creation, bringing to an extreme the visual and electronic poetry, considered by Toti as the sum of all arts in his infatigable search for a total art. His interests in science made him use the most advanced technologies to prepare, in 1986, a series of video poems for L'Imaginaire Scientifique of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie of Paris. In "Orden, Chaos y Phaos", for example, he uses sophisticated fractal geometry programs to represent a diverse and open interpretation of the theory of chaos, that goes beyond the scientific discovery, where color forms and electronic compositions metamorphose themselves in a complex and systemic set. Toti doesn’t analyze the world; he tries to change it through our mind, understanding that knowledge cannot be obtained only by traditional ways (what we call "western culture"), but also through the reinvention of history, legends, oral traditions, rhythmic forms and popular culture, trying to create a "new alphabet" of the visual. This is why it’s not by coincidence that Toti’s latest works had been related to AmerIndia, interpreting it as a land of hope for humanity, of new history in their past, in search for their future through traditions, misunderstood by many as "old" or "primitive" traditions, when they are really a mixture of old and new media art, a fusion of cultures and languages. Historically, media art cannot be only represented from the early avant-garde onwards; we need to consider that media art was present since ancient times. From Shamanistic rituals, that could not even be compared to today’s virtual reality immersions, to musical and artistic developments. We are still analyzing media art as if it is a new way of creation simply because it tends to use electronic technology and digital computers. But I would like to emphasize with Toti that an assortment of "new media ecologies" can be found already in the Pre-Columbian art and techniques. For example, the quipu is a network-technology. [2] Five hundred years ago, western explorers returned from "remote areas" reporting that they had discovered "primitive tribes" with "primitive technologies" and "primitive languages". All those stories proved to be scientifically false, since many of those languages are more complex grammatically than English or even Chinese (languages associated in that time to human civilization). [3] The language is one of the primary subjects in Toti’s work. Composed of a rich mixture of idiomatic expressions, mostly in French and Italian, but with a deep influence from all the languages of the world, his works require no translation. We can understand it as a new language, a "totian" language, a magic prose, a poematic construction of words that interfere among them to create new ones. In this sense we hear phrases in Quechua, Mic-Mac or Aymara that reminds us to the "experience of the other". With language we can invent, every sentence is a new invention, produced by combining familiar elements; the perfection of human inventiveness is linked to the perfection of human language. In his videos Toti is trying to say us that language should be renewed, not technology. We must think of the linguistic words and the problems of communication. Power is based in thought, not in language, and then we have to define techné, not technology. We cannot speak more on the science of though if we think it’s based on technology, we must first speak of the language of techné. Deconstructing the music into parts and mixing new and old compositions, as in the case of the languages has also been present in the work of Gianni Toti. In the case of the works selected in this homage, the compositions are created with many traditional rhythms and voices. The black screen is also an emblematic symbol at the beginning of his works: the voice of Toti in black reminds us to a dream in which we hear but cannot see, the voice guides us to a new metaphoric space. The voice of Toti is the musical overture to the synthesis of images coming afterwards. Gianni Toti is interested in the lessons of history: revolutions, scientific discoveries, technological inventions, but specially the revolutionary thoughts when they exceed the facts and deliver signs. Art gives Toti a way of applying the philosophical and scientific thought with an amplitude of dimensions to create, finding mental models for a new way of anti-describing and re-evolutioning the world, a gramsciateguian metaphor, that concretizes with "Tupac Amauta" project, as a living essay on LatinAmerIndia’s reality, as Toti calls it; but also planetopolitane, since its the necessary continuation of "Planetopolis", [4] the poetic essay on the negative utopia of the planetary uninterrupted city. In Toti’s videos the voice of the author makes poetry and resonance in a panorama where film is constantly present. Toti has been using film to re-elaborate images of history and re-create them today (in our future). When we see his works, we are not the same, we feel different, and we think different, as Rose of Luxembourg said: "To think is to think diverse". This is the diversity of languages that had been the fundamental weapons for Toti’s struggle and fight to change the world. All languages form the diversity and by simple iteration, like in fractal geometry, create complexity, which is what we find in his synthetic and moving images. For Toti there are always big doubts and questionings. He is always waiting for something to happen, but nothing happens, and if something happens is not important, since if it’s important it will not happen… But it should…

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Notes: [1] Handwritten manifest by Gianni Toti for the presentation in Latin America of "Gramsciategui ou les poesimistes" (2000). [2] The quipu was an Incan accounting apparatus consisting of a long rope from which hung secondary cords and various tertiary cords attached to the secondary ones. Knots were made in the cords to represent units, tens, and hundreds. [3] Diamond, Jared. "The evolution of Human Inventiveness", in Murphy, Michael P. and O’Neill, Luke A. J. (editors), What is life?: the next fifty years: speculations on the future of biology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 41-55. [4] For more information on "Planetopolis", see: Heck, Georges. "Gianni Toti/autour de PLANETOPOLIS", Realisation: CICV Pierre Schaeffer Montbéliard-Belfort, France, December 1996. Lischi, Sandra. "PlaneToti notes" (Notes pour un voyage dans la "planète Toti", l'univers "poétronique" de l'artiste Gianni Toti: ses idées, ses rêves, Planetopolis, sa planète-maison, ses livres, le monde...), en coproduction avec CICV Pierre Schaeffer Montbéliard-Belfort, Italy/France, 1997. (Duration: 30min40)

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "13º Videobrasil": de 19 de setembro de 2001 a 23 de setembro de 2001, p. 174 a 175, São Paulo, SP, 2001.