DAILY ROUTINE

Video 4K, 11’

Courtesy the artists and Fondazione In Between Art Film

Commissioned and produced by In Between Art Film for the project Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence

MASBEDO

Nicolò Massazza (1973) and Iacopo Bedogni (1970) began working together in 1999 as MASBEDO, focusing on video art and installations. Their artistic research has focused on the theme of incommunicability both on a personal level, between couples, and on a larger scale, highlighting the paradox of society of communication. This has led them to produce very intimate pieces alongside work with a greater anthropological, social, and political feel.

They express themselves through the language of video, in different forms such as performance, theater, installation, photography and recently cinema. In Italy they are recognized among the most important video artists and innovators in the field of contemporary art. Thanks to their unique feature of re-union of different arts the multiplicity of languages becomes a single chorus. MASBEDO’s aesthetic approach is pictorial. They strive to engage their audience by using the moving image as an immersive installation. The work is a synthesis of theatre, performance, architecture, and video.

The protagonist of Daily Routine lives in a bare house of glass and concrete, where just a few minimalist furnishings punctuate an otherwise empty space. From dusk into the night, her solitude is interrupted only by a sequence of ordinary actions that seem to have become routine: checking the security cameras, smoking a cigarette, fixing dinner, and exercising on an elliptical bike. It soon becomes clear that the austere, see-through architecture is actually an instrument of control: everything is visible from outside, and a distant gaze seems to detect every movement taking place inside this structure of surveillance.

The silence that weighs on this house is interrupted only by a few peremptory phone calls, which seem to be instructions that require no reply: a male voice checks that everything is locked up and expresses satisfaction with the flawless decor. Through a very spare use of action and narrative, Masbedo turns the camera into an obsessive tool of male domination, depicting the frenzy of narcissism, the yen for control, and the expression of violence through the subtlest forms of objectification. In Daily Routine, partner abuse has no need to manifest itself through sudden, shocking acts: it is deeply entrenched in the relationship dynamics, seeps into the walls and glints off the vast windows, dwells in the silences and gives an infernal rhythm to physical exercise, pervading even the act of nourishment. And it is precisely through the mechanical aspect of that workout that this film reveals its subtlest and most chilling side, the bassline and constant beat of violence.