VIDEOMOBILE

2018, Multi Channel Video Installation with sound, 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.

Videomobile (2018) is an OM van from the 1970s which MASBEDO transformed into a “video wagon”, a mobile laboratory, on the occasion of the 2018 edition of Manifesta Biennial in Palermo.

Through this curious vehicle equipped with a stage for performances, interviews, and screenings, MASBEDO investigated the history of the city through the lens of its cinema, with a special focus on themes such as the dynamics of power and those socio-cultural changes hidden in the contemporary history of Palermo, while paying a particular attention to issues such as the sense of belonging, and faith in utopias.

In the first phase of their research, MASBEDO created and archived interviews with professionals who have worked in the cinema industry in an almost anonymous or marginal way, such as make-up artists, extras or technicians. In the second phase, they replaced the latter with more well-known personalities such as directors, intellectuals, producers or politicians. In the third and last phase, they included some of those people in the realization of performances produced with their Videomobile in the streets and squares of Palermo.

When parked, the Videomobile became an interactive video installation housed in the atrium of Palazzo Costantino, with monitors and screens that acted as a narrative device, presenting a sort of journey through the visual worlds of Vittorio De Seta, Gianfranco Mingozzi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ugo Gregoretti, Mario Baffico, Francesco Rosi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Letizia Battaglia, Mimmo Cuticchio and many other directors, authors and artists who have succeeded in creating other worlds in the city of Palermo.

Through this project, produced in collaboration with the Regional Film Library of the State Archives of Palermo, the Sicilian Film Commission and the National Film Archive in Rome, MASBEDO aimed at bringing video and performance to the streets of Palermo, focusing on the tradition of early films, when traveling cinemas projected films from vans.