METZ.- Fondazione ICA Milano presents the second appointment part of the international tour of the project Ritratto di città (Portrait of a city). 20/20.000Hz by MASBEDO, curated by Cloe Piccoli. The project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (11th edition, 2022), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.
After its debut hosted at the School of Digital Arts (SODA), Ritratto di città is being presented for the first time in France in the spaces of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, activating an unprecedented dialogue with the city.
Ritratto di città (20/20,000Hz) stems from Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni's aptitude for investigating forgotten histories, irregular fragments, gaps in time, hidden researches that reveal extraordinary energy: one of these is the history of the Studio di Fonologia RAI in Milan founded by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna in 1955, and officially opened in 1956. A crucial experience for electronic and concrete music and for phonology, an experience that, placed in a contemporary perspective, reactivates new processes and visions today. Ritratto di città (20/20,000Hz) is the reenactment of Ritratto di città (1954) by Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Roberto Leydi, a synergy of actions that recreates in the contemporary that powerful short circuit between radio and city, in which avant-garde research and public service converge. Starting from this experience that marked the history of electronic music, and in which radio played a fundamental role in avant-garde research and its return to the public, MASBEDO creates a layered and multimedia project. Ritratto di città is an itinerary in stages that takes the form of the creation of an unedited multichannel video, an immersive installation, a series of sound performances, a public program, and a volume published by Marsilio Arte, design by Leftloft.
Ritratto di città continues in the city of Milan, during Art Week, with three events: the video and sound performance specially designed for the Triennale's Salone d'Onore (April 9, 2024), the exhibition with multi-channel projection in the spaces overlooking Piazza Duomo of the Museo del Novecento (April 11-June 30, 2024), where Ritratto di città by MASBEDO interacts with the museum, architecture and the city. Finally, on Sunday (April 14, 2024 4:30 p.m.) MASBEDO, Cloe Piccoli, Nicola Ricciardi, Director of miart, and Alberto Salvadori, Director of Fondazione ICA Milano, will converse with the public in a talk at miart - Milan's international modern and contemporary art fair. On April 13, 2024 Ritratto di città will be in Turin at Fondazione Merz with screening and talk. While on April 23, 2024, the project will be presented in a conversation on art, electronic music, architecture, and the city at MAXXI in Rome, where the work will be installed in the videogallery from April 24 to May 5, 2024. In May 2024 the Public Program with important international guests will be held in Triennale Milano and Castello Sforzesco and will explore issues of art, architecture, video, archive, music and TV inspired by the multidisciplinary breath of the project.
MASBEDO explains, "We felt the need to pay tribute to a prolific season of intellectual vivacity such as there has never been in Italy before. A new city was being born, unique in Italy, with a new idea of language, a new approach to urbanism, art, literature and even cinema. It was at the forefront because of proposals such as the RAI Phonology Studio, an international-level experience dedicated to sound and electronic music with features that made it unique."
The curator of the project, Cloe Piccoli explains: "Ritratto di città goes in and out of places, studios, architectures, urban spaces, to create a specific, energetic, powerful context made of sounds, performances, moving images. In a path between macro and micro, where the infinitely small coincides with the infinitely large, sound and image dwell on removed, lateral details, which instead, as often happens in MASBEDO's works, are passages of scale, key joints that open to other imaginaries."
Ritratto di città is an image journey through urban space and tells its story through a harmonious combination of creative languages. In the first chapter of the video, images of the RAI Studios in Corso Sempione, designed by Gio Ponti, alternate with the rooms of the Civic Museums of Castello Sforzesco, interweaving with sound fragments captured by microphones installed on the twenty-seventh floor of the Torre Velasca and reworked in the studio. In the second part, however, Ritratto di città becomes an ecosystem, a dense program of interventions and insights made by a large selection of artists, musicians, performers and experts in the field, which contributes to building the multifaceted image of a city, Milan, crackling with energy and in constant transformation. Participants include Swedish performer and vocalist Stina Fors, artist Martina Rota, actors Camilla Semino Favro and Adriano Di Carlo, historic RAI Radio 3 anchorman Pino Saulo head of the radio broadcast “Battiti”, biologist David George Haskell, ethologist Federica Pirrone, producer and author Kit Mackintosh, critic Delia Casadei, architectural theorist Manuel Orazi and composer Nicolas Becker. Drawing inspiration from the many creative contributions that have made the Phonology Studio a unique venture, MASBEDO's video narrative alternates between sound restitution and performative interpretation.
At the end of the production and international promotion, the video work Ritratto di città will be included in Museo del Novecento’s collection in Milan.
MASBEDO's project curated by Cloe Piccoli aims to reactivate in a contemporary perspective a fundamental experience for the creation of a new language and a new cultural identity with an international and avant-garde scope. Ritratto di città develops, today, with images, sounds, words, books, and a comprehensive public programme, that experience in a context of international exchanges. This is how the open, fluid, unencoded, unwritten language of the Studio di Fonologia's electronic music, broadcasting from the RAI studios in Milan to the city by video and via airplay, becomes a vehicle for a reinterpretation and an innovative, experimental, radical vision of the culture of the project.
