Gian Maria Tosatti – History of Night and Destiny of Comets
Pavilion of Italy, La Biennale Arte, Venice
Architectural installation documentation, 2022
This series documented Gian Maria Tosatti’s large-scale installation History of Night and Destiny of Comets. The commission focused on the staged journey through emptied industrial interiors evoking Italy’s post-war “economic miracle” and its collapse, leading to the final, more ethereal space where light and reflection suggest a fragile, almost celestial future for humanity’s brief passage on earth.
Exhibition text by La Biennale
History of Night and Destiny of Comets is an installation by Gian Maria Tosatti that combines literary references, visual art, theatre and performance. It confronts the fragile balance between humanity and nature, between the dreams and mistakes of the past and the prospects for the future.
The first part, History of Night, traces the rise and fall of the Italian industrial “miracle”: the vast warehouses between Ragusa and Cremona, the single, paradoxically homogeneous panorama of a hypothetical journey into the Italian provinces that today reflects the frustration of a working class that has come to an end. This scenario sets the stage for the epiphany of the last act, Destiny of Comets – that is, of humanity that has crossed the earth in a rapid and luminous trajectory without, in the end, being guaranteed the right to inhabit this planet forever. Here, imagination is overturned in a cathartic epiphany.