Gianni Toti

To celebrate the centenary of his birth, VIDEOFORMES 2024 pays tribute to this pioneer of the digital arts by presenting Gramsciategui, ou les poésimistes, a video that evokes the troubled times we live in today.

Gramsciategui, ou les poésimistes

It had been announced as the second canto after the videopoemopera TUPAC AMAUTA – first canto. But could we sing under the bombs that the globalizing European nation (French, Italians, English) were dropping on our people? Could we sing, under the deadly bombs, the epic of José Carlos MARIATEGUI and Antonio GRAMSCI ? It was better to turn the song into a cry. To make the sequences of moving image-colour cry and to show the artronic counter-songs of the monument in Chlebnikov and Tatlin to the Third International, rediscovered as the very symbol of the interlaced double helix of the human genome that structures DNA. Or again, to “metaphorize” the snowy owl’s hunting of the little rat, that opens the terrible allegory of war, which cannot be sung. In the same weird fashion, to deal with the “rhetorems” of the crises of contemporary language in the glyphs of the Maya and of other peoples, who have been run across by 500 years of holocaust (not only in Latin America). In this train of thought, the cry, like an reversed song, develops the great metaphor of Quetzalcoatl, the serpent that creeps up the steps of the pyramid and turns into a bird, into an eagle and finally into a man (if humanity existed yet… but we are still in the prehistory of that species of armed murderers and warriors). In the end, we have managed to show the few cinematic images we could find in a sudden awakening in Antonio GRAMSCI’s story and in consciousness. The second cry is thus also that of the pictorial, sculptural and domestic “artronic” images. The “sonata in red major” thus attempts to be a cry of electric poetry, but let us already conceive and prepare the third cry as a conclusion to this strange trilogy. The discovery of the language of electronic art goes on.