PROTOCOL 90/6

2018, site-specific video installation, produced by In Between Art Film, commissioned by Manifesta 12

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.

MASBEDO’s Protocol No. 90/6 (2018) is a site-specific video installation realised at the same time of their Videomobile project (2018), which investigated the rich relationship between the Sicilian city of Palermo and Italian cinema, on the occasion of the 2018 edition of Manifesta Biennial in Palermo. Especially conceived for the Sala delle Capriate inside the State Archives of Palermo, Protocol No. 90/6 is a tribute to the vicissitudes of the film director Vittorio De Seta. The video installation consists of an imposing, suspended curtain of cables and LED lights where we see a Sicilian puppet moving there accordingly to the invisible strings pulled by master puppeteer Mimmo Cuticchio.

“We decided to work on the image of a puppet because it is a metaphor of the artist. The artist is a person who frees things even when tied up and controlled”, says MASBEDO.

During his career, De Seta was suspected of concealing a hidden agenda favouring “communist” subversive groups and was thus subjected to the surveillance of the local authorities. De Seta’s story was unearthed by MASBEDO while working at the State Archives of Palermo, and thanks to the unique expertise of the Archives’ staff. It was contained in an unusual folder dating back to 1956, alongside many other dossiers and reports concerning artists, directors, writers and journalists.

De Seta’s dossier became the symbol of what Protocol No. 90/6 aimed at communicating, and was thus displayed at the entrance to the Sala delle Capriate — itself a place of absolute mystery and silence dedicated to the preservation of a non-organisable memory, an archive arranged in accordance with the non-rules of time and chance, which have transformed thousands of un-catalogued documents into stratified matter, paper fossils, dust and ink.

The wooden puppet was realised especially for this video installation by Cuticchio’s family.