Masbedo
Glíma, 2008
Monochannel video
Beta Pal 16/9
Duration 17’59”
with Erna Ómarsdóttir and Jón Páll Eyjólfsson
Music Marlene Kuntz - Gianni Maroccolo
Costume Designer Gabriella Battistini

The work entirely produced in Iceland include videos, photographs and video installations. These works confirm the analytical research ability of the Italian video artists duo that in a direct and surgical way make a lucid autopsy of desire of contemporary man, using their pictorial and metaphysical language. The artists face the limits and the possibilities of human condition, describing how today desire is weakening the sense of existence, desire meant as neurosis of the contemporary, only engine of all capitalistic western societies.
The choice of Iceland, a distant fluctuating island at the extreme north west of Europe, meets two important concepts in the works of Masbedo, the beauty that emanates from the senses of extraneity and of mystery and the solitude and melancholy that result from these elements. This island, a mass of lava covered with glaciers, straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and is splitting between the North American and Eurasian Plates, lacerating itself three centimetres every year. Becoming the metaphorical place of the fracture of the West, Iceland is a metaphysical and surrealistic set for an accurate analysis of the crisis of the values of contemporary society. Iceland conceptually represents a paradigmatic dimension of human beings and a perfect frame for the mental existentialist scenographies of Masbedo.
The video tell us about destruction of the sacred intimacy between a couple and the desperate struggle of manipulation, metaphorical battle between a man and a woman who are abandoned in a desolated land, amongst ice, water and black lava sand. A non-place where desire runs through long black filaments, frustrating and alienating nourishment that feeds the two human beings, bringing them closer and distant, in the impossibility to love and belong to each other.
The entire and vast project has been made in collaboration with some of the most important Icelandic artists such as performers, actors, musicians, writers and directors.