Federico Tosi at Almanac Inn

Artist: Federico Tosi

Exhibition title: Baby

Venue: Almanac Inn, Turin, Italy

Date: April 13 – June 10, 2017

Photography: Sebastiano Pellion, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Almanac Inn, London/Turin

And I was able to stay there
starting again
in between the closed and soft eyes of my REM
in between the Greek columns of a caprice
where naked boys scampered
and the yellow air
and I was hugging my friend while we were walking, laughing, surprised
because that place was around the corner but we’ve never noticed.
And my girl was naked sitting on a capital
climbed by ivy
soaked in water
and had her neck soft as a Parmigianino falling out of proportion on a side
while she was turning looking at the water
but she wasn’t my baby anymore
it was a reality in which she
has always been there
and the kids were running in circles
around me and my friend
and we didn’t know what we would have done to the future
what we would have done to the world.
And their clothes were simple, white, soft ripped linen
and they played with time by competing between a crumbling frieze
and a venous foot of Fidia.
And you were seeing their frenzied legs while they were chasing each other
and those round cheeks that mirrored the light.

***

Science began with the stars, where mankind discovered the dominants of the unconscious. Such projections repeat themselves whenever man tries to explore an empty darkness and involuntarily fills it with living figurations.

The dawn before sunrise contains all the colours, like the moulds growing on tropical trees. Their combination is white as the morning light. It opens up possibilities, contains everything and its opposites, like Mercury, male and female, fluid and rocky. They are the primordial opposites that project possibilities of a future, which includes universes in which humanity is already extinct, but its distorted and consumed projections remain. In their darkness the psychic backgrounds of the observer is reflected, their fears, their language.

Gaia does not and could not care about human or other biological beings’ intentions or desires or needs, but Gaia puts into question our very existence, we who have provoked its brutal mutation that threatens both human and nonhuman livable presents and futures.

Human beings seem intent on making as many new fossils as possible as fast as possible. They will be read in the strata of the rocks on the land and under the waters by the geologists of the very near future.*

 Baby, it’s imagining planets in the moment of their formation or parallel realities with worlds inhabited only by white butterflies and magnolia.

*Donna Haraway

Federico Tosi, Baby (fossil), 2017, concrete, red wax, dirt, 142x140x20cm

Federico Tosi, Baby (fossil), 2017, concrete, red wax, dirt, 142x140x20cm

Federico Tosi, Baby (fossil), 2017, concrete, red wax, dirt, 142x140x20cm

Federico Tosi, Baby, 2017, installation view, Almanac Inn, Turin

Federico Tosi, Baby, 2017, installation view, Almanac Inn, Turin

Federico Tosi, Baby, 2017, installation view, Almanac Inn, Turin

Federico Tosi, Baby, 2017, installation view, Almanac Inn, Turin

Federico Tosi, Baby (bones), 2017, carved bone

Federico Tosi, Baby (bones), 2017, carved bone

Federico Tosi, Baby (bones), 2017, carved bone