For the Milan stage of the project Techno Casa, at Marsèlleria, Riccardo Benassi has created a site-specific environmental installation whose throbbing core is a cycle of ten films (video-essays) called Attachments” (lasting 3 hours, overall).
The film’s sound – a spine rather than a soundtrack – fills the void left by the visual and spatial interventions created ad hoc, thus fostering an emotional relationship with the hosting architecture.
The entire project is the artist’s reflection on how the use of new technologies – smartphones in particular – completely alter our relationship with everydayness, and it can be seen like a sort of attempt to define the practical possibilities for a “neo neo realism” that must come to terms with a total redefining – under the influence of Internet¾of the very notion of reality itself.
In following this idea, the architecture (which always plays a fundamental role in the work of Benassi) seems transformed into a system of presentation and display, thinned out to the two-dimensional reality of a TV screen. Thus the interventions conceived for the spaces at Marsèlleria – visual, objectual, spatial, and sonorous – may be seen as a method of reactivating the architecture itself.
The films – lasting about 15 minutes each – are called “Attachments” because they all stem from the introductory video, Techno Casa an introduction to – https://vimeo.com/65541365. Each Attachment of Techno Casa is a black and white film shot with a smartphone upon which a “news television” red band hosts a story, questioned at times by some surprising color animations in animation graphics and 3D.
The first five Attachments were produced by Xing for the second edition of Live Arts Week (Bologna, April 16 – 21, 2013) and presented at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna http://www.liveartsweek.it/eng/riccardo-benassi. The remaining five Attachments were produced by the Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Ferrara for Art Fall 13 (October 4 – 6, 2013, Videoteca Vigor del Comune di Ferrara), curated by Maria Luisa Pacelli – http://artemoderna.comune.fe.it/1906/techno-casa.
Thus Filipa Ramos describes Riccardo Benassi’s work: “Riccardo Benassi has a dangerous mind. The encounter with his lucid eyes and endless flux of thoughts, transmitted through his projects and works, offers the risk of forever conditioning our form of seeing and relating to the world around us. A philosopher of the present, he helps the world by revealing mystic truths (to stay with Bruce Nauman), which appear as clear as water once he enounced them and shared them with the others. Benassi’s works are the result of an articulated assemblage of images, sounds, colors, texts, design objects, and diverse materials, which are put together to generate large-scale installations, videos, performances, artist’s books, and sculptural elements in which the visual part is one of the many elements that compose the final result. This combination of material and immaterial substances places him in the threshold between a spatial practitioner, a researcher, a theoretician, and an experimental musician. Frequently collaborating with others, Benassi is one of the most interesting agitators of the European underground experimental music scene, and since 2004 he is, together with musician Valerio Tricoli, the creator and promoter of the project Phonorama, a collaborative live electronics project. In 2006 he founded, together with Claudio Rocchetti, the audio-visual duo OLYVETTY.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a critical text by Andrea Lissoni.
Together with Techno Casa at Marsèlleria, the ten videos will be presented on November 23, in Florence at the Museo Marino Marini. An encounter with Riccardo Benassi, Alberto Salvadori, and some members of Superstudio will follow. The event is a book launch by Riccardo Benassi, Attimi Fondamentali – published by Mousse Publishing, Milan – with contributions by Alberto Salvadori, Riccardo Benassi, Piero Frassinelli / Superstudio, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Markus Miessen, and a conversation between Riccardo Benassi and Liam Gillick.
Riccardo Benassi was born in Italy in 1982; he grew up in Cremona, on the banks of the Po River, and currently lives and works in Berlin. He uses his role as artist, writer, performer, musician, and designer to make works that are aimed at creating new situations. He has exhibited in numerous institutions in Italy and abroad, including recently MAMbo – Bologna, MACRO – Rome, Museo Marino Marini – Florence, CCCS – Florence, NCCA – Moscow, 25th Nadezda Petrovic Memorial – Cacak, Diapason Gallery – NYC. His research provides opposition to growing virtualization, aiming to re-establish the primary value of the sensory experience through a constant revision of the concept of architecture. The common denominator of his installation environments is a temporary appropriation of the void that occurs through the use of sound and constant experimentation with the possibilities of the “non-visible” within the conceptual matrix. He recently published Letters from the Passenger Seat with No One at the Wheel (Mousse Publishing, 2010), Briefly, Ballare (Danilo Montanari Editore, 2012), Attimi Fondamentali (Mousse Publishing, 2012) and co-edited the series Doormats for Errant Bodies Press. He teaches Sound Design at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bergamo, Italy.