Installation view at Fondazione ICA Milano
BLIND MIRRORS
2019, Courtesy In Between Art Film
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 Blind Mirrors (2019) stages the convergence-conflict of two seemingly distant cultures, the Western European and the Indian-Tamil, in the evocative 18th-century setting of the party hall of Palazzo Gangi in Palermo. There, Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti shot the famous dance scene in his masterpiece film “The Leopard” (1963). This scene leads to one of the founding themes of the movie: the detachment from the old, declining aristocracy of the time, and the establishment of the new, increasingly powerful bourgeoisie.
Starting from that cinematographic reference, the artists invite us to reflect on contemporary society, recreating another scene in the same place, where dance has once again a central role. In Blind Mirrors, the aristocratic elements are replaced with the presence of the Tamil community of Palermo — an attempt to bring a different and minoritarian community into a place of power.
The movie develops through the choreography of Bharatanatyam, one of the main expressions of Indian traditional dance originating in the temples of the Tamil Nad state and Sri Lanka. This dance expresses religious themes and spiritual ideas of Southern India: it is a sophisticated vocabulary of sign language based on the gestures of hands, eyes and facial muscles. Hypnotic and seductive, it was banned by the British colonial government in 1910 but the Indian community managed to expand it outside the temples in the 20th century.
Blind Mirrors’ title takes inspiration by a detail that stuck wih the artists during their first visit to the Palazzo. The mirrors inside the room where Visconti shot his film are entirely dark, and therefore almost completely unable to reflect. This phenomenon occurred as Visconti and his cinematographer decided to directly position beams of tungsten light towards those mirrors to give an even more diffused and brilliant light. After many days of rehearsals and filming, those mirrors burned out and therefore blackened forever. This note of decadence functions as a rupture element within the sumptuous hall, metaphorically reflecting the political, social and individual implications of memory and its transmission.