Italian Pavilion - 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia

History of Night and Destiny of Comets (Storia della Notte e Destino delle Comete) is the title of the exhibition project of the Italian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition - La #biennaledivenezia (23 April - 27 November 2022), promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity - Ministry of Culture.
Curated by Eugenio Viola, the exhibition presents the work of a single artist for the first time in the history of the Italian Pavilion: Gian Maria Tosatti. The curator chose a project that would act as a powerful statement of contemporaneity, capable of restoring a bold reading of the present and giving Italy a unique voice.
The Italian Pavilion will be inaugurated Friday April 22 at 4.30pm. Will participate: the Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini, the President of La Biennale di Venezia Roberto Cicutto, the Major of the City of Venice Luigi Brugnaro, the Director-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and Commissioner of the Italian Pavilion Onofrio Cutaia, the curator Eugenio Viola and the artist Gian Maria Tosatti.
History of Night and Destiny of Comets is conceived as a vast environmental site-specific installation that occupies the whole space of the Tese delle Vergini. It proposes a vision of the current state of humanity and its future prospects. The work is conceived as an intermediary device that contains and mixes a variety of languages, as usual inTosatti's research, which integrates literary references and visual art, with stimuli from theatre, music, and performance. A complex, experiential narrative machine that leads the visitor along a sensitive, sometimes familiar and sometimes unsettling path, with the aim of creating a new awareness and concrete reflections on the possible destiny of human civilisation, which fluctuates between the dreams and errors of the past and the promises of a future that has yet to be written in part.History of Night and Destiny of Comets tells of the difficult balance between man and nature, between sustainable development and territory, between ethics and profit, proposing an aesthetic reading of this scenario and offering an unprecedented platform to develop a comprehensive and profound debate on these issues. The exhibition is envisioned according to a theatrical ratio that articulates the narrative into a prologue and two acts: History of Night and Destiny of Comets.
Italy, with its particular historical background as a young nation recovering from two world wars and affected by an extraordinary economic growth, the so-called "Italian miracle", provides the scenario for this exhibition. The space of the first room is a journey into the ‘Bel Paese’ and coincides with the Story of Night or rather the symbolic story of the rise and fall of the Italian industrial dream.
A series of industrial spaces, originally used for various productions, silently guard obsolete and disused machines, abandoned and lonely objects, in which there is no trace of the human presence that once made them useful and functional. Disturbing scenarios prepares for a final vision in which the imagination is overturned in a true epiphany. 
The settings recall La Dismissione (The Dismissal) by Ermanno Rea (Feltrinelli, 2002) and the expanse of warehouses that stretch across the landscape between Ragusa and Cremona, the only paradoxically homogeneous panorama of a hypothetical provincial Italian journey.
The Destiny of Comets is the final vision, which reminds us that indignant nature has not forgiven man since the time of the Flood. Through this image emerges a powerful and unsettling epilogue, an inverted disturbing element, the sign of a possible peace.

Therefore, the exhibition ends with a message of hope about the destiny awaiting this
humanity that, like a comet, has crossed the universe with a great luminous trail. The last room opens to a nocturnal and troubled sea beating against its walls. A row of half-sunken street lamps indicates that until recently there must have been a square and a street in front of us, where now only dark water flows. On the threatening surface of this dark and inscrutable sea there unexpectedly rises an inversely disturbing element, the sign of a possible peace: a swarm of hundreds of fireflies flying over a world where nature has regained its dominion and restored its
cruel law of supreme beauty and harmony. It is a vertigo that transforms desolation into painful compassion and hope.
«I would give the whole of Montedison for a firefly», writes Pier Paolo Pasolini at the
end of a famous article "The Vacuum of Power" (Corriere della Sera, 1 February 1975) about
an epochal passage told through the metaphor of the disappearance of fireflies,
understood as the final and heinous crime of the new fascism: neo-capitalism.
Today, with Montedison gone, perhaps the Destiny of Comets can be symbolic of this
firefly hovering on the great dark expanse of water with which the work concludes. It
alludes to the consequences of ecological catastrophes, but also makes them explode, as
in the tradition of Greek tragedy, the cathartic element of the work.
The Italian Pavilion will be a continuous forum throughout the exhibition - in person
and online - thanks to a calendar of scientific-informative meetings that will bring
together professionals and experts from the eco-ecological field and protagonists from
the world of culture on the themes of the exhibition. The conference programme will extend
from Venice to the rest of the world, thanks to a number of international institutions
that will organise debates on the themes addressed by the Pavilion, real embassies of theHistory of Night and Destiny of Comets abroad. All the themes dealt with, the ideas
generated and the reflections developed will be collected on a website available to anyone
wishing to deepen their research into alternative models of life and development. In
parallel, an extensive corpus of audiovisual documents of the work will be created, from
its creation to its presentation to the public.
History of Night and Destiny of Comets explicitly refers to the United Nations 2030
Agenda for Sustainable Development (signed by 193 member countries in September 2015 UN)
by stimulating a public debate about the environment, the urban landscape, and
sustainable ecologies. The project touches the whole themes explained in the 17 goals
signed by the United Nations, related to the health and education of future generations,
the protection of nature, sustainable development in terms of territory and rethinking
ethical models of production, consumption and profit.
The Italian pavilion has also been realized thanks to the support of Sanlorenzo and
Valentino, the main sponsors of the exhibition. Thanks also to the sponsor Xiaomi, the
main technical sponsors Folio, Italstage, FPT Industrial, and the technical sponsors
Bonotto, Fondazione Morra, Laterlite, Marcegaglia and Mosaico Studio. Special thanks alsoto all the donors whose names appear in the colophon who have made a fundamental
contribution to this project and to the media partner Il Giornale dell’Arte.