Masbedo: Symphony of an Execution

Masbedo will be presenting a new project at the Mart di Rovereto comprising three works:

Symphony – a video-audio installation produced by the Mart

Execution – a video-audio performance with live sounds by Marlene Kuntz

Symphony of an execution – a video-audio sculpture which, in uniting the two other works, rounds off the exhibition project and gives the exhibition its title.

The first two works, Symphony and Execution, will be presented on Saturday, 10 October, on the occasion of the eleventh Contemporary Art Day.
The event begins at 6 p.m. with the exhibition of the Symphony installation and continues at 9 p.m. with the performance of Execution in the eighteenth-century Teatro Zandonai in Rovereto, a year after it was returned to the city.
The inauguration of the project concludes with Aperitif with the artist on Sunday, 18 October at 11 a.m., with the presentation of the third work.

Val di Fiemme is one of the most famous valleys in the Trentino and a lively tourist destination renowned for its forests of Norway spruce, the so-called resonance spruce that are part of the area’s natural heritage. These precious trees are the starting point from the finest stringed instruments in the world. It is said that Stradivari used personally to visit the forest in Val di Fiemme to choose the trunks best-suited for the making of his violins. The wood of the resonance spruce is particularly elastic, transmitting the sound better, and its lymphatic capillaries create resonance like tiny organ-pipes. For the very best instruments, even today centuries-old trees are chosen with care, “listened to” and cared for by woodsmen who care for and protect them generation after generation, passing on a unique know-how.

The duo’s investigation starts from here, from the forests that are home to the Norway spruce from which perfect violins are made. With Symphony of an execution, the artists explore the relationship between death and life, in the passage between two complementarities. The exhibition is a project about rebirth, about the act in power but also about nature, rites and skilled gestures.

The death of the tree leads to the birth of marvellous instruments in which the wood comes back to life. The raw material – rough, irregular and powerful – becomes harmony, lightness, fragility. To arrive at the creation of the sublime, a destructive, heart-wrenching gesture is necessary: an execution. Playing on the linguistic ambivalence of the term, MASBEDO tells how a death sentence is transformed into music, how form is generated from destruction.

The Symphony of an execution exhibition project blends the linguistic forms of art, music and performance.
The exhibition is a progress made through a series of steps. It begins at 6 p.m. on 10 October with the presentation of Symphony, a monumental and immersive multimedia installation in which the observer loses his way in an experience of personal and intimate interaction. The sounds of the forest and felling of a centuries-old spruce, combined with the musical interventions arranged by Carlo Boccadoro, composer and musicologist, create a score in which the images combine with the power and enchantment of the sound. The work, produced by the Mart, will join the museum’s collections.

On the same day at 9 p.m., video art and music will create a new dialogue in Execution at the Teatro Zandonai in Rovereto. MASBEDO will once again be working in collaboration with the alternative rock band Marlene Kuntz in a live performance mixing sound and visual improvisations against a majestic backdrop of red spruce trunks transformed for the occasion into containers of sounds and surfaces for projected images.
The videos, sounds and scenography will constitute the starting point for the video-audio sculpture rounding off the Symphony of an execution exhibition, which opens on 18 October at the Mart.

Curated by Gianfranco Maraniello and Denis Isaia, the exhibition has been organised thanks to the fundamental contribution of the APT di Fiemme and the Magnifica Comunità di Fiemme, owner of the valley’s woodland assets.

The Symphony work and the performance of Execution will be presented on 10 October 2015 on the occasion of the eleventh Contemporary Art Day. Set up by AMACI (Associazione dei Musei di Arte Contemporanea Italiani, of which Gianfranco Maraniello is the president), it comprises about a thousand Italian institutions and other bodies, encouraging the awareness, education and participation of visitors.

With Masbedo’s Symphony of an execution video-audio sculpture, the Mart is participating in a national project called L’albero della Cuccagna. I nutrimenti dell’Arte (The Maypole. Feeding Art), organised by Achille Bonito Oliva, with the patronage of Expo 2015 and the collaboration of Sensi Contemporanei, and experimental cultural programme realised by the Agenzia per la Coesione Territoriale and MiBACT.
The programme sees the participation of museums, foundations, public and private institutions which, by inaugurating environmental installations, are creating a nationwide exhibition from 25 September to 31 October.

The Symphony of an execution exhibition, during which the video-audio sculpture made following the performance will also be shown, will be inaugurated on the occasion of the ArtVerona|Art Project Fair (16-19 October 2015), the modern and contemporary art fair of Verona, with which the Mart collaborates. Aperitif with the artist, a morning talk during which artists and curators meet the public, is included in the fair’s collateral events and will take place at the Mart at 11 a.m. on Sunday, 18 October.

Finally, in conformation of the blend of art-forms underlying the work of Masbedo, from 8 to 17 November at the Teatro Filarmonico in Verona the Fondazione Arena di Verona will be staging a new arrangement of Mozart’s Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte), for which Masbedo will be responsible for the sets. Directed by Mariano Furlani, conducted by Philipp von Steinaecker.