2019, 75′ Produced by In Between Art Film
Official Selection Lo Schermo dell’Arte Festival internazionale di cinema e arte contemporanea, Florence 2019
Official Selection New:Vision Award CPH:DOX 2020
Official Selection Sharjah Film Platform 2020
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.
MASBEDO’s Welcome Palermo (2019) is a film dedicated to the rich relationship between the Sicilian city of Palermo and Italian cinema.
Taking its title from a street mural that greets anyone who arrives in Palermo from the city’s airport, the film is the feature-length documentation of Videomobile, another project who MASBEDO produced for the 2018 edition of Manifesta Biennial in Palermo. V
ideomobile is an OM van from the 1970s which MASBEDO transformed into a “video wagon”, a mobile laboratory. This curious vehicle, equipped with a stage for performances, interviews, and screenings, became a multi-channel interactive installation which toured across many Palermo squares during the biennial.
The artists interviewed well-known cinema personalities from Palermo, such as the city’s mayor Leoluca Orlando, princess Vittoria Alliata di Villafranca e Valguarnera, musicologist Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, and Sister Cornelia of San Paolo Film. The artists also spoke with cinema professionals working behind the scenes as well as with Palermo residents about the meaning of cinema, taking both participants and public on a collective exploration of the island’s special film history and of how it has shaped the cultural image of Sicily and Palermo.
In Welcome Palermo, interviews alternate with archival materials about the grandiose legacy of directors Luchino Visconti, Ugo Gregoretti, and Vittorio De Seta, performances by writers, DJs and Palermo residents who recite questions on sexuality asked by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his film Comizi d’amore (1964). The film ends with a traditional dance performed by members of the Palermo’s Tamhil community in the ballroom of the city’s Palazzo Gangi, the set of the final scene of Visconti’s movie The Leopard (1963).
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