Riccardo Benassi
Così per dire
Percorrendo le vie del borgo fino alla vecchia scuola oggi abbandonata, dal calare del sole fino all’alba, si può scorgere l’apparizione: un sussurro di parole che si rincorrono in echi. nelle ore in cui solo gli orologi muovono le braccia, la parola scritta diventa psicosuono
Riccardo Benassi, Così per dire, 2022, Pesariis (UD), Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Ph. Giulia di Lenarda – gerdastudio
Riccardo Benassi (Cremona, 1982) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Berlin and online. His work focuses on the impact of technology in our daily relation to space and how technological devices change the structure of our daily life and organise reality. He implements sound and language through time-based installation, visual poetry, video-essays and architectural interventions. Benassi has been working as professor of Sound Design at the Accademia di Belle Arti Carrara in Bergamo since 2013, from 2014 to 2016 he was a professor of Creative Practices at dBs College in Berlin, and has been guest lecturer at NABA in Milan since 2019.
He has published: Letters from the passenger seat when no one is behind the wheel (Mousse Publishing 2010), Briefly, Ballare (Danilo Montanari 2012), Attimi Fondamentali (Mousse Publishing 2012), Techno Casa (Errant Bodies 2015), Sicilia Bambaataa (NERO Publishing 2015), Morestalgia (NERO Editions 2020).
His work has been shown in public and private spaces in Italy and across the globe. Some of his recent shows by him include: Macro, Rome (2022); Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Genève (2021); MoCA Taipei, Taiwan (2021); Museion, Bolzano (2020); ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe (solo show) (2020), Lo Schermo dell’Arte (2020), Center d’Art Contemporain Genève (solo show) (2019), Live Arts Week / ART CITY Bologna (2020), ICA, Milan (2019); IIC Melbourne (2019); Galleria ZERO …, Milan (2019); Impakt festival, Utrecht (2019) ; MAMbo Bologna (2018); Parc Saint Léger, Guérigny (2018); ArtLine, Milan (2018); Kunstraum Potsdam, Berlin (2017); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (solo show) (2016).
Pesariis, a hamlet of the municipality of Prato Carnico, in the province of Udine, is a small village in the Val Pesarina (also known as the valley of time) of about 200 inhabitants. The village has preserved the typology and structural set up of its original urban centre in this mountainous region. Pesariis is known as the land of the watches: there are documents that testify the watchmaking production of this village from the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1725, the Solari family founded under their family name a factory for the production of watches. This factory is still operating today.
A walk through the streets of the town, among the ancient Carnic (From Carnia, meaning from the Eastern Alps) houses, allows you to discover a variety of imposing clocks, each one different from the other in size, colour, characteristics, mechanisms and operating modes that form the Monumental Watchmaking Route: great for those who love walking at a slow pace, marked quite literally by the tolls of time, it’s an evocative route that blends art, craftsmanship and technology and that harmoniously interacts with the most picturesque corners of the village. In Pesariis, you will also find the Watchmaking Museum which documents the centuries-old watchmaking tradition of the valley. A collection that traces the technological evolution of Pesariss’ watchmaking from the oldest to the most recent watch models: watches in forged iron, watchtowers, paddle clocks, timepieces, right up to the Cifra 3 model which is part of the collection of objects of design by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.