The Fondazione Merz is a partner in the project Ritratto di città (20/20.000Hz) by MASBEDO, curated by Cloe Piccoli and promoted by the Fondazione ICA Milano.
The project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (11th edition, 2023), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.
Ritratto di città by MASBEDO takes its name from the first sound composition by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna that inaugurated the experimental practices of the Studio di Fonologia RAI in Milan in 1954. The project is the reenactment of the innovative experience that, starting with electronic music, broadcast by radio, expands into a broad vision involving architecture, art, design and literature as elements of civil and democratic rebirth. MASBEDO’s project takes the form of a video, a volume published by Marsilio Arte, with a design project by Leftloft, and an extensive programme of projections, installations, sound performances, conversations, and public programmes aimed at involving international professionals in an artistic and cultural exchange that lies at the heart of Italian Council’s mission.
An integral part of the project is the wide and significant network of international institutions, which contribute to developing the research, production, dissemination and communication of the work. The project partner is SODA (School of Digital Arts) in Manchester, with whom a collaboration has been set up to create an exhibition and public programme. In addition, Soda will provide the project with cutting-edge video and audio technology and professionalism. A prestigious network of Cultural Partners including SODA (School of Digital Arts), Centre Pompidou-Metz, Museo del Novecento Milano, Triennale Milano, Castello Sforzesco di Milano, , Fondazione Merz Torino and MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo will contribute to the development of the project with specific screening, performance and public programmes.
At the end of the production and international promotion, the video work Ritratto di città will be acquired by Museo del Novecento 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.
