The project revolves around the exhibition at the Fondazione featuring 9 video works, some of which are site specific while others span the last ten years of the artists’ production. It has been conceived as a single installation site connecting all the works and taking up the entire exhibition space to transform it into an immersive environment, into which visitors can dive as they journey through the exhibited works.

The duo’s work provides the backdrop to several reflections and investigations that explore Art’s relationship with theatre, cinema, literature, music, dance, as well as Art’s visionary quality and ability to represent nature and the human condition. Powerful yet refined, Masbedo’s visual imagery owes much to art history and the ongoing search for the total work of art, as a natural aspiration and the ideal realization of artistic production.

The interaction with the figure and work of Mario Merz will be central to the exhibition. The artists chose the video Lumaca, shot by Gerry Schum in 1970. Showing Merz drawing a spiral onto a glass screen in front of him, the video dates back to the dawn of video art history itself and almost unintentionally represents a work of video art, while condensing Merz’s thought into a single gesture.

Having envisioned a collective work, Masbedo invited a group of International video artists (among which Lin de Mol, Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, Rä Di Martino, Jan Fabre, Shaun Gladwell, Sigalit Landau, Marzia Migliora, Damir Ocko, Nicolas Provost, Catherine Sullivan) to reflect both on this historic video and on the very identity of video art by each presenting a work that is a personal mark, a reflection, a note. All the works together ultimately form a spiral-shaped installation, a sequence of videos as fragments of a dialogue.

This collective work becomes both the point of arrival and the essential turning point of the idea from which the exhibit Todestriebe originated, that of lack of communication. Its positive message is ascribed to the action of Art itself, as the only dimension and area of thought that can be an element of communication, capable of becoming a word, a shared emotion.