MASBEDO

Fondazione ICA Milano and Museo del Novecento present the first exhibition of the project "Ritratto di città (20/20.000Hz)" of MASBEDO, curated by Cloe Piccoli, among the winners of the 11th edition of Italian Council, the program of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture aimed at the international promotion of Italian contemporary art. The exhibition Ritratto di città (20/20.000Hz) opens to the public from Thursday, April 11 to Sunday, June 30, 2024 in the space of Museo del Novecento in Milan, where an unprecedented project returns for the first time a glimpse into MASBEDO's complex and layered research. The exhibition rooms on the fourth floor of the Museum, which for the first time hosts a temporary exhibition, dialogue with the unprecedented multi-channel video installation. The exhibition is a journey among music, images, the city and the museum, moving in and out of the screen to create an immersive environment that extends to the space of the Duomo square. The entire exhibition is alive, in which avant-garde compositions and city noises, views 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 video, in a radio broadcast that becomes a performance, the RAI recording studio is transformed into a laboratory, where performers, composers, scholars, sound theorists, architects, designers, scientists, and actors create a new portrait of the city in the era of global ecological crisis. Here reality and fiction overlap in a narrative between radio and city, voice and body, laughter and politics. 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 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. On display at the Museo del Novecento Milano, video-captured images of the Milanese architecture that most evokes the democratic engagement of reconstruction, soundtracked by performances that interact with the space of architecture and the real space of the museum, within which the audience becomes an integral part of an immersive installation.

At the conclusion of the production and international promotion, the video work "Ritratto di città" will become part of the collections of the Museo del Novecento.