Archive Cinema City 2011.
Theorem of Incompleteness, Masbedo’s first video from the Icelandic period (2008), recounts the strained relationship between man and woman – a central theme in the two artists’ poetics – through the destruction of fragile crystal and glass objects which metaphorically symbolize the dissolution of the sacredness and the intimacy of the couple. Exploring the limits and possibilities of the human condition, the video shows how powerful desire – i.e., contemporary longing-neurosis, the single driving force behind all Western capitalist societies – can be when it comes to withering our sense of existence. The idea of setting the video in Iceland, an island in the extreme northwest of Europe, flaunts two concepts that are omnipresent in the works of Masbedo: beauty, which surges from the sense of extraneousness and mystery; and the sense of solitude that stems from beauty. This land – in geological terms, a block of lava covered with glaciers – is a creation wrought from the clash between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, situated on a mid-ocean ridge and crossed by a fault line that is constantly growing wider (to the tune of three centimeters annually). This indeed turns out to be the ideal setting for the Milanese duo’s mental and existentialist explorations. The choice of location is by no means happenstance, but dictated by a marked interest that has pushed Masbedo to metaphorically develop a sort of parallel between the territorial tectonic conformation and the collapse of the Icelandic utopia, when the island, as the old continent’s epicenter of economic crisis in the Western world, bore the brunt of U.S. banks catastrophe in 2008. Reflection on upheaval in Western society is for Masbedo a pretext for opening up the discussion and underscoring title. We played with light more like “informed optimists” than pessimists, because society inspires a constant weakening of the will. But we continue to reassert the concept of fighting for what you believe in, even in absurdity.
You’ve got to keep fighting.»
Genre: Video installation 
