Damasa by Gian Maria Tosatti enters the Capodimonte collection. Permanently set up in room 82

The Capodimonte Museum and Real Bosco di Capodimonte presented Damasa, the work by Gian Maria Tosatti that has been permanently installed in Room 82 of the Reggia and was acquired into the collection thanks to the support of the PAC 2022-2023 - Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the Ministry of Culture’s General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity.

Made and exhibited in Naples for the first time in 2017, Damasa is theenvironmental installation conceived as the house of the soul of writer Anna Maria Ortese, considered one of the greatest literary voices of the Italian 20th century. The title of the work derives from the name the writer gave to one of the characters in the experimental novel The Port of Toledo, in which she recognizes her alter-ego.

Accepting Tosatti’s wish not to exhibit the work far from Naples, Sylvain Bellenger, in the dual role of director of the Capodimonte Museum and curator of the project, allocated Room 82, on the second floor of the Reggia, for thepermanent exhibition of the installation, thus returning a real and at the same time visionary space to the writer and breaking the exile that has long relegated Ortese, who died in solitude hundreds of miles away, still dreaming of Naples. Thanks to this acquisition, Damasa finds its chosen home in one of the museum’s rooms significantly facing the harbor, located in continuity with the Contemporary Art Section, along the exhibition route dedicated to the seventeenth century.

The environmental installation reproduces a domestic space. In a single room, surrounded by piles of ashes and burned newspapers, on an old floor, a few pieces of furniture, a bed, a table and a chair find their place. A transformation is taking place on them; wood, sheets or a piece of bread change their substance into white onyx, a material often used by the artist as an analogy of the soul. Damasa is a complex work: it intends to interweave biographical elements of the artist and the writer to whom it is dedicated. It wants to reproduce a space of the former’s soul and a transfigured room similar to the many in which the latter lived between Rome, Milan, Genoa and Rapallo, after leaving Naples.

“Our stories are timeless and endlessly repeated, because the world does not change, humanity does not change. Antigone’s story today is the same as that of hundreds of girls living today in Ukraine or Russia, Israel or Palestine. So it is for Ortese. Damasa is her or will be tomorrow one of our daughters. On the other hand, Naples has not changed since 1953 either,” Tosatti explained.

The installation aims to return a home to Anna Maria Ortese in the city. The one of her youth, at the port, was destroyed by bombing. Then hers was an eternal and tormented wandering, first among the alleys of Chiaia and then in other cities that welcomed her when Naples turned its back on her. 1953 was the year of her departure. The same in which she published Il mare non bagna Napoli, her most famous book, which ends with a harsh and disillusioned attack on the fragility of her contemporary Neapolitan authors. This cost her marginalization from the city’s cultural milieu and a forced exile that never ended.

“It is a great honor that the Capodimonte Museum does me by permanently dedicating an entire room to one of my works. Perhaps excessive. I find the courage to welcome it only because I seem to share it with Anna Maria Ortese, to whom this installation is dedicated,” the artist added. “It comes here after being exhibited in the Lia Rumma Gallery in 2017. Back then, the space did not have windows. It was a closed, intimate, spiritual place. The museum’s request to acquire it was accompanied by a proposal for a room in which to place it. And the first thing that director Sylvain Bellenger told me, to tell me about it, was that the room had a wonderful window overlooking the harbor. I consider that to be his valuable curatorial contribution.” “There, works, like men and women,” he continues, “have stories; and, over the years, they learn to change. The window now becomes a nodal and poetic element of the work. Now inseparable from it. With the 2017 installation-which the museum had decided to acquire-we were returning Ortese to Naples, after seventy years of exile. With the 2023 one-which we installed-we return Naples to Ortese. And, perhaps, we do something even more profound. The writer’s last words as she died in the hospital in Rapallo were, ”How far is the sea? I would like to see it for the last time."

“I owe the discovery of The Port of Toledo to Gian Maria Tosatti, and I can say without reservation that it is one of the greatest texts in Italian literature written by one of the greatest Neapolitan authors. Like the ’stanza d’Angolo,’ which I consider one of the greatest heroines of The Port of Toledo, the window of Room 82 of the Reggia di Capodimonte opens onto the port of Naples, the sky and the sea, dreams, the beauties that are such only for visionaries, the shattered world of childhood, the fraud of memory and poverty,” commented the director of the Capodimonte Museum and Royal Wood Sylvain Bellenger. “Room 82, which sounds like a code name, has been for nearly eight years dedicated to the focus exhibition series ’Sensitive Encounters,’ where different interpretations, stimulating and moving encounters have been exhibited. The series closes today with Damasa, Gian Maria Tosatti’s work that places literature and visual art in dialogue, each being an attempt to construct the world through a different language. The room imagined by Gian Maria Tosatti migrates of literary ”expressiveness,“ as Ortese puts it, to the plastic ”expressiveness,“ of Tosatti himself. Those who, like the young Damasa, decipher the world follow its magnificent mythologies. In this room we also find ourselves dreaming, imagining a homage to rain, sewer grates, small streets, ashes, the emptiness and silence of poverty and Sundays... Damasa will be the last exhibition in the series, and as of today Room 82, with Tosatti’s permanent work, thanks to the foresight of the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity, is named Damasa’s room. This is a fitting recognition Tosatti offers us for the great artist whom Naples has enchanted and annihilated.”

Damasa by Gian Maria Tosatti enters the Capodimonte collection. Permanently set up in room 82

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.