Look Beyond

The video Look Beyond was produced specifically for the Seràgnoli Hospice Foundation, by Nicolò Masazza (Milan, 1973) and Jacopo Bedogni (Sarzana, 1970), an artistic duo that goes by the name of MASBEDO, one the most interesting producers of video art on the international scene.
The word “Contamination” provides the key to understanding their artistic practice, characterized by a constant encroachment onto other disciplines. Cinema, theatre, music and literature come together in an alchemy of aesthetically sophisticated and highly evocative images: there are complex visual interweavings, a poetic and at the same time disconcerting atmosphere, set in a timeless dimension. The artists love to call their poetics “technological existentialism” because it is an existential reflection on the human condition conducted using a sophisticated and technologically innovative language.
Look Beyond refers to the vital impulse that goes beyond thought and involves a flow of complex images that create a stimulatingly rich visual and intellectual relationship with the viewer.
In the video, scientific images from an ophthalmic institution alternate with hauntingly beautiful poetic and evocative images, a series of lyrical visions of nature and close-ups of children and women. The images are those of the eye as a sight organ, but also as a vehicle of emotion and memories, as a threshold that conveys the emotions from the outside to the inside. And then there are symbolic images of hands that touch, that are intertwined, that caress water. It is a work about memory and memory interwoven, on the one hand, with a poetic investigation into the permanence of images in the memory and, on the other hand, a scientific analysis of the perception of images.
In fact, the artists conducted their research in scientific areas, drawing inspiration from an ophthalmological examination: the retinal fluorescein angiography, and from this we learn that the eye is a living organ constantly receiving images and being stimulated by them, even if in that precise moment, attention and awareness of the subject are absent.
This striking information inspired the idea of creating a dialogue between suffering and the emotion of beauty, hope and memories. Thus the desire to present images intended as visual stimuli was born, as vital impulses beyond thought.