Journalist, video artist, curious intellectual and experimenter, the inventor of poetic electronics is also told through poems and writings, testimonies, unpublished documents and photographs with his traveling companions, from Pasolini and Zavattini to Marguerite Duras, Di Vittorio and Berlinguer. There exhibition opens on June 27th and closes on August 8th
◆ The article by CESARE A. PROTECTÌ
► On the centenary of the birth of Gianni Toti – journalist, video artist, curious intellectual and experimenter, inventor of “poetronics” – inaugurated on June 27th in Alatri (and will close on August 8) the exhibition ”Habitat Gianni Toti”. It tells the story of the heritage of books, objects, works, paintings, papers of Gianni Toti and his first wife, the Hungarian artist Marinka Dallos; a heritage passed from house to house until the final moment “author’s library” opened in the town of Alatri, in Ciociaria.
Author libraries, which are growing in number and quality in our country, are very important because they are collected, merged in a functional manner to its activity, by a significant subject for the cultural community. Since the second half of the 20th century, interest in these book collections has progressively increased also because they are intertwined with important moments and characters in Italian and world history, not just cultural. The personal story of Gianni Toti, who passed away in 2007, begins with the partisan resistance and it develops in the struggles for work in Italy and in the scenario of the US-USSR tug of war on a global level.
It accompanies the exhibition – and becomes an orderly and profound guide – the book Gianni Toti or poetrythe first Italian monograph about this artist, curated by Sandra Lischi and Silvia Moretti and reprinted on the occasion of the centenary with some updates. «The volume – explains Sandra Lischi – collects, alongside texts by various authors on the literary, political and editorial commitment of this great “coSmunist” traveleralso poems and writings by Toti himself, testimonies, unpublished documents and photographs with his traveling companions, from Pasolini and Zavattini to Marguerite Duras to Di Vittorio to Berlinguer. Toti has intertwined his own path with Neruda and Cortázar, Che Guevara and Alain Robbe-Grillet and many other figures of the twentieth century. The book is therefore also the story of an eventful and creative cultural season». © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
