PANTELLERIA

2022, single-channel video, color, stereo sound, 19’

Courtesy of the artists, and Fondazione In Between Art Film

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the exhibition “Penumbra,” 21/04/2022 – 27/11/2022, Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice

MASBEDO

In their practice, the artistic duo MASBEDO (Nicolò Massazza, 1973; Iacopo Bedogni, 1970) focuses on the moving image through an interdisciplinary approach, ranging from video to performance, theater, installation, photography, and film. Their projects reflect on memory and its transmission, as well as the fragility of art and its preservation.

Pantelleria engages with the historical and mythological legacy of Operation Corkscrew: between 9 May and 11 June 1943, Pantelleria island was violently bombarded by the Allied troops in the first operation to reconquer Italy. Residents recall that, after the surrender, some of the village’s buildings were blown up for the cameras of a propaganda combat film. Pantelleria traces the memories of this episode settled in the collective consciousness of the island and looks at the contemporary implications of an event in the shadow of official history. Through a two-year-long participatory process with the residents, the film explores the tension between the truth and its ideological distortion, and between the reality of the bombs and their telling through images. The Nervi hangar, a symbol of Mussolini’s militarisation of the island, is filmed empty and inhabited by a magical animal presence. Extracts from the combat film are projected onto the buildings of today’s Pantelleria, while the camera travels through the bunkers dug by the Italian army. The voiceover, written and read by writer Giorgio Vasta, gives expressive form to the island’s stories, while the sound by GUP Alcaro and Davide Tomat distorts the recordings of the local orchestra Spata, finding in dance music a space for the reactivation of the past, and liberation in the present.