Portrait of a city by MASBEDOs on display at Milan's Museo del Novecento

Fondazione ICA Milano presents to the public from April 11 to June 30, 2024 in the spaces of the Museo del Novecento in Milan the exhibition Ritratto di città (20/20,000Hz) by the duo MASBEDO, curated by Cloe Piccoli. The exhibition Ritratto di Città (20/20,000Hz) opens an exhibition project that returns for the first time a glimpse into MASBEDO’s complex and layered research. It is a journey between music, images, city and museum, moving in and out of the screen to create an immersive environment that extends to the space of the Cathedral Square. Avant-garde compositions and city noises, glimpses of the RAI studios on Corso Sempione, rooms of the Civic Museums of Castello Sforzesco with BBPR’s installation, and contemporary cityscapes converge in the exhibition.

In the video, in a radio broadcast that becomes a performance, the RAI recording studio is transformed into a laboratory, in which performers create a new portrait of the city in the era of global ecological crisis. Participants include Swedish performer and vocalist Stina Fors, artist Martina Rota, actors Camilla Semino Favro and Adriano Di Carlo, historic RAI Radio 3 host Pino Saulo in charge of the “Battiti” program, biologist David George Haskell, ethologist Federica Pirrone, producer and author Kit Mackintosh, critic Delia Casadei, architectural theorist Manuel Orazi, and composer Nicolas Becker. MASBEDO’s Portrait of a City (20/20,000Hz) stems from Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni ’s aptitude for investigating forgotten histories and irregular fragments that reveal extraordinary energy: one of these is the story of the RAI Phonology Studio in Milan founded in 1955, and officially opened in 1956. The project is a re-enactment of Ritratto di città (1954) by Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Roberto Leydi, combining avant-garde research and public service in a powerful marriage of radio and city. Upon completion of the production and international promotion, the video work Ritratto di città will become part of the collections of the Museo del Novecento in Milan.

The exhibition is among the events of Milano Art Week (April 8 - April 14, 2024), the widespread event coordinated by the City of Milan in collaboration with miart, Milan’s modern and contemporary art fair, which networks the main public and private institutions with a dense program of activities and projects, enriching the city’s cultural landscape with collateral events that reconfirm Milan as a privileged place for the exploration and investigation of contemporary languages. In addition to this, the Ritratto di città program includes several events: on Sunday, April 14, 2024, at miart - the international modern and contemporary art fair in Milan, there will be a talk with the participation of MASBEDO, Cloe Piccoli, Nicola Ricciardi (Director of miart), and Alberto Salvadori (Director of Fondazione ICA Milano). On April 13, 2024, “Portrait of the City” will be in Turin at the Fondazione Merz, with screenings and a talk. On April 23, 2024, the project will be presented in a conversation on art, electronic music, architecture and the city at MAXXI in Rome. The work will be installed in the videogallery from April 24 to May 5, 2024. In May 2024, the Public Program with international guests will be held at Triennale Milano and Castello Sforzesco. The program will explore topics related to art, architecture, video, archives, music and TV, inspired by the multidisciplinary nature of the project.

“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 the Italian scene, with a new idea of language, a new approach to urbanism, art, literature and even cinema. It was at the forefront precisely because of proposals such as RAI’s Studio di Fonologia, an international-level experience dedicated to sound and electronic music with features that made it unique,” says MASBEDO.

“Portrait of the City 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 journey between macro and micro, where the infinitely small coincides with the infinitely large, sound and image dwell on removed, lateral details, which instead, as is often the case in MASBEDO’s works, are passages of scale, key junctions that open to other imaginaries,” explains Cloe Piccoli, curator of the project.

Image: MASBEDO, Portrait of a City (20/20,000 Hz) (2024), installation view at the Museo del Novecento. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Portrait of a city by MASBEDOs on display at Milan's Museo del Novecento

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