(My Heart is a Void, the Void is a Mirror) is an ongoing project about the crisis of democracy by Gian Maria Tosatti. It is leading the artist across an enlarged map of Europe (the whole area influenced by the European culture along History) to witness the present state of our civilization.
Europe is perceived like a confederation of states in peace and prosperity. The truth is quite different. The whole continent is on fire for wars (Cyprus since 40 years, Ukraine, recently Georgia), ethnic conflicts (Turkey, Israel- Palestine), or destruction manu militari of entire cities (The Jungle of Calais, France...). Fascism and totalitarianism are rising again while people seems sick and tired of politics and maybe of our civilization - born with democracy in Athens - too. From South, as it was described by Pasolini in his Profezia (1964), the people that suffered the consequences of our colonialism and supremacy are coming back to the motherland we imposed them centuries ago, like an unavoidable consequence of our past actions, presenting an old score that we never settled.
This new cycle of works ideally inspired to the last trilogy of novels by Louis Ferdinand Céline, is be a pilgrimage across Europe made by an artist. He’s making a portrait for each city touched by his journey, with the final purpose to sew them all together in a big fresco that could show the zeitgeist of this present time. Every chapter of this new “visual novel” by Tosatti is defined by the general title of the project written in the language of the country in which the work take place, with the specification of the city in which it is realized. The general title is in Yiddish which is the official language of the project. The reason of this choice depends from the importance that language has in the structure of a society. Language is the blueprint of thought. In his speech for the Noble Prize in 1978 Isaac B. Singer declared that Yiddish is a language in which it has never been pronounced a military order. In a project in which the fidelity of the portraits is crucial and cannot be determined by ideological and personal positions, the choice of the language is the only political position expressed by the artist.