This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Todestriebe by MASBEDO (Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni) held at Fondazione Merz from 3rd October 2014 to 11th January 2015. “The mantis waiting in the shadows is a still taken from the latest video by the Masbedo, entitled Todestriebe, which means death wish, a concept identified by Freud as an unavoidable aspect of the human unconscious, which aspires to the enjoyment rather than to one’s well-being. […] Todestriebe is also the title of the exhibition that Iacopo Bedogni and Nicolò Massazza are presenting at the Fondazione Merz, because it is an instinct that permeates every work in their exhibition project. Conflict, dramatic relationships, loneliness all appearing together in an atmosphere of aggression and passiveness. It seems that life itself is cannibal by definition, like a kind of mantis.

The vision of all this is a real, deep, titanic lack of communication, a silence that comes like a glaciation and envelops the universe, with all its protagonists, organic or otherwise, including the gods and the space beyond the known world. The Masbedo speak of this vision by creating a sensible appearance dense with perceptions, forging a mythical and hallucinatory imagery, which speaks an ancestral language in which many elements have been absorbed. They stage universal stories forged into visual icons, with a hybrid language which, within the moving narrative, merges the styles of other artistic alphabets in a continuous creative and technological experimentation. […] The exhibition at the Fondazione Merz is a long journey that involves the city with several other initiatives. The observer enters and follows a story done in stages, which traces out the last twelve years of the artists’ work and offers a debate on the issue of incommunicability as a characteristic aspect of the human condition. Historical works and other, new, ones explore breaking moulds and experiments in the light of what they call “technological humanism”: artistic research as a critical investigation of the anthropocentric dimension exasperated by postmodernism, in the context of new media. A theme that has been developed by the artists at the workshop conducted at the Holden School with a group of students including pupils from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, the results of which were presented at Artissima. The Fondazione is transformed into a place of apparitions, parables of contemporary mythology. The screens and projections are presented as entrances, as living narrative elements. The works in the exhibition investigate the idea of contemporary failure, an aphasic emptiness born of the impossibility of relationship and communication with oneself, first of all, and then with others and with society, but also with history and nature”. (Olga Gambari) This book reproduces the photographic documentation of the exhibition and it is enriched by texts by Olga Gambari, Michel Houellebecq, Michel Maffesoli, Beatrice Merz, Chantal Nava, Walter Siti, Monique Veaute.