Interview - Federico Tosi
by Elena Bordignon
by Elena Bordignon
[Elena Bordignon] When it starts to get hot even before summer arrives, I have the feeling that everything begins to stir — people, situations; even our thoughts seem to get excited with the heat. After all, when the temperature rises, the particles, atoms, and molecules that make up a substance start to move, sometimes randomly, to vibrate, and to rotate. Do you have the same feeling?
[Federico Tosi] I start to chafe when it gets hot. “Sweating is beautiful,” isn’t it? Art also seems to reflect the hot season. Yes, because art makes you active and leads you to interact, so automatically you generate heat; you move things around. The very act of thinking generates heat. So yes, the arrival of heat definitely sets things, ideas, and people whirling.
[EB] Why did you become an artist?
[FT] As a child I was good at drawing. Or rather, I was always told I was good at drawing; being told that is enormously important in encouraging someone to persevere. I do not remember exactly how my experience in art began. I only know that at a certain point I was in love!
[EB] Where did you spend your training years?
[FT] I studied at the Boccioni art high school. I wanted nothing to do with mathematics, and there was a girl I liked who had been at middle school with me and I thought she would enroll there too, but when I started school I found out she had gone to another institute! In any case, I understood right away that it was my world. I liked being there, I was very active, and I had even started organizing exhibitions with other students at the school. I followed the Cultural Heritage and Restoration track. In those years I studied a great deal of art history, archival science, cataloguing, and restoration techniques. During high school I painted a lot, a practice I stopped when I enrolled at Brera and began attending Alberto Garutti’s course. He did not inhibit my painting practice, but he was always very clear and often repeated: “I do not know how to talk about painting.” So I decided to take on techniques and themes more in line with the research of those years. Then I moved toward sculpture during the two-year specialization course, and I began to take an interest in a range of techniques such as marble working, molding, terracotta, and other materials.
[EB] Once the Academy was over, what happened?
[FT] I began to travel and to do artists’ residencies more or less everywhere. When I came back to Italy, I was living and working in an apartment in Bovisa, and to support myself I did tattoos at home; then I became an assistant to various artists. When I started producing and selling work, the space was no longer enough for me, so I rented the studio where I work now, and for a few years I lived there.
[EB] Now that you have a large studio, how do you experience your hours in this place?
[FT] The studio is in the Ponte Nuovo area, a delightfully multi-ethnic neighborhood in the north of Milan, though when I arrived eight years ago there were still traces of countryside. I spend the vast majority of my time in the studio; I work a great deal, but it is also a place where people often gather with friends and enjoy the night.
[EB] You were telling me about your desire to travel. What was your last trip?
[FT] I traveled with my parents from childhood, then as I grew up I began to explore on my own. I was in India last February, a place I love very much and go back to whenever I can. Traveling gives me an ancient sense of fulfillment, and I try to do it in the most minimal way possible almost every time. I set off with drawing pads, colors and so on, very few clothes, and a small, compact backpack that is by now historic.
[EB] You use painting, sculpture, drawing. How do you choose the most appropriate medium? Or do you start from the idea, from the content, in order to make a work?
[FT] I almost always start from the content. The material and the way it is worked are secondary. Right now I am working on a series of clay sculptures depicting elderly people. They are mostly lying down or in relaxed poses, and their expressions are serene, happy. To achieve this “sensation” of bliss, the most functional medium was terracotta, with no particular treatment, no glazes or anything else. I wanted the sculptures to be made of pure matter, so the medium had to be raw and direct.
[EB] Who are these figures, what do they mean?
[FT] It is a new cycle of sculptures in which I find myself visualizing ‘old age.’ The idea comes from another work, a graphic novel I have been working on for years, which I publish with the independent magazine Frankenstein. In this novella the characters are locked into their age for hundreds of years. There can be a child who has been 10 years old for 200 years, or an 80-year-old who stays imprisoned in that age for centuries. I like the idea that there might be an imperishable age, a state of eternal existence. It is a theme I have taken up in other sculptures too, such as ALMOST, an elderly, wrecked robot that tries to speak and tell its story and never manages to, because it jams and always starts over from the beginning. I wanted to simulate a perpetual, programmed senile dementia. With the sculptures of the happy old people I am talking about a carefree old age, an almost unthinkable one; I decided to leave them naked, so they have no attribute that defines the period they are living in. They could be contemporary, or they could be Homo sapiens at the dawn of things. Or from the future…
[EB] They all have happy, serene faces. Why represent happiness?
[FT] Being happy today is the most difficult thing one can do. Happiness is a form of rebellion and of resistance. There is a 2018 album by Idles that I have listened to hundreds of times, Joy as an Act of Resistance, a record that made me think and gave me love, shouting it in my ears. “I thought, fuck, I want to adopt this way too, this attitude toward life.” Being cheerful, today, is civil disobedience.
[EB] What are your sources of inspiration?
[FT] In the case of the recent sculptures, the research goes a long way back. I began to take an interest in the origins of humanity, from Australopithecus to the present. A kind of envy came over me for certain very distant historical periods. I think that when Homo sapiens appeared, life must have been wonderful. That being, not very different from what we are today, could explore a boundless planet; everything was new, uncontaminated, certainly dangerous, but unknown, there to be discovered and understood — “once the world was young and strong,” as Giovanni Lindo Ferretti puts it. We are their frustrated descendants, and I believe contemporary society is not much less ferocious and treacherous than a rainforest. Then came the ice ages, but those are another kind of problem.
[EB] Nature, in every sense, is very present in your work. Fire, air, heat, matter. You made a series of works in which the central element was wind and its effects on matter.
[FT] It was an exhibition in which I recounted an explosion and its consequences for the objects around it. I was interested in how matter disintegrated as it approached the shock wave. In the works you never see the explosion itself, only the effects: the closer you get to the blast, the more the matter disintegrates. The further away you are, the more it becomes a light breeze. It’s like the way problems approach us: as long as they are distant, they never seem so enormous.
[EB] Matter that consumes itself, works that disintegrate. I am thinking too of your attraction to smoke. Cigarettes, smoke, and ashtrays appear in many of your sculptures. Do you smoke a lot?
[FT] Enough. I like the irreversibility of combustion. Matter consuming itself through fire fascinates me. Smoking, but also the act of setting something alight, attracts me because it does not allow you to go back. We consume ourselves daily, irreversibly. We are made to consume ourselves.
[EB] Does this have to do with the series of paintings you are making about volcanoes? What fascinates you about these subjects?
[FT] I think it starts from my being drawn to places that are uncontaminated, remote, and very far away in time. In none of the paintings is there any human presence; even the vegetation almost disappears. What remains are desolate, solitary wastelands. If there is any nature, it is sparse, something that has survived. These paintings recount the transformation of the landscape and of the matter that composes it at the very moment of its mutation, at the peak of the heat. After the eruptions, those places will become fertile and harmonious again.
[EB] Where did the idea of representing them come from?
[FT] I am interested in the origin of life. The greenhouse effect created by volcanoes allowed the planet’s atmosphere to form, and underwater volcanoes allowed the first cells to take shape. These volcanoes are understood more as generators of life than as phenomena of destruction. Moreover, like the sculptures of the happy old people, they are phenomena without time. Their atemporality makes them perennial elements on the earth, now as millions of years ago. And in the future they will still be there, transforming everything.
[EB] Remote times, far-off eras, atemporality and prehistory: you live in the present, but your reasoning seems to wander in places lost in distant pasts.
[FT] I like thinking about the world when it was profoundly different from the one I live in now. I would like to spend a day in the middle of the Carboniferous and take a look at that landscape. Many of the problems we have today are due to thinking of ourselves in the short term, which is an extreme form of selfishness. But personally, I understand the life of the planet and our own existence in a far more expanded way. I think about problems like the pollution caused by the spread of plastic, and I hope that in the future the earth will produce a bacterium capable of processing it — but for that to happen, hundreds of thousands of years are needed, which for us is an inconceivable span of time. We have to emancipate ourselves from biological time, which is extremely ephemeral compared with the history of the earth. We are creatures too young, born on a planet too old.