the classroom #3
Masbedo
MASBEDO, Handle with care, 2017, video still. Courtesy the artists
CLASS
HANDLE WITH CARE
Sala d’Arme in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
In the framework of the exhibition Handle with care, Masbedo were invite to teach a course open to the public and to students. The course focused on the artists own sources of research and inspirations, unfolding the DNA of videos, performances and installations they realized in the past fifteen years. The exhibition at Sala d’Arme in Palazzo Vecchio was thus shaped to host the classroom and presented a sample of their studio. Here actually MASBEDO worked by using support structures (Things, 2012) and have been engaged in live moments, followed by a open classroom to the public articulated into film screenings, lectures and readings with the artists and invited guests.
EXHIBITION
HANDLE WITH CARE
Reggia di Venaria Reale and Centro Conservazione e Restauro, Turin
Handle with care is the title of the multi channel video installation produced on the occasion of the exhibition by Masbedo, Nicola and Iacopo, working together since more than fifteen years, combining visual arts, performing practices, choreography, literature and music into a personal artistic vocabulary.
Masbedo then found themselves crossing two Italian restoration and conservation institutions, Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence and Centre for Conservation in Venaria Reale, which for the first time have been unveiled by a contemporary art production. Such ideal sets, where the image is recovered after being damaged by time and then relocated into the public sphere, are Italian excellences where zooming in and out, thinking about the art making processes, from the raw material up to the finished object. This way doing, they established a dialogue with specific contexts, chosen as places of production and exposure. Next to the video, the artists present in the exhibition a selection of objects usually manipulated by their artistic process but revealing the DNA of their finished works: sculptures, cropped images, installations, miniaturized theatrical sets and others tools of different scale. These are actually clues that come from the artist studio, a space where the research has grown over the course of a year or more of work. The whole project offered to the public a double act exhibition, staged in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and in La Venaria Reale and Centro Conservazion e Resaturo in Venaria Reale – TO, where two classrooms built a tightened dialogue with the architecture.
The exhibition came out also in the form of a book, entitled Psychic Diary conceived as confession book and written with the artists during the one year backstage of the project.
See the video here
