Val di Fiemme is one of the most famous valleys in the Trentino and a lively tourist destination renowned for its forests of Norway spruce, the so-called resonance spruce that are part of the area’s natural heritage. These precious trees are the starting point from the finest stringed instruments in the world. It is said that Stradivari used personally to visit the forest in Val di Fiemme to choose the trunks best-suited for the making of his violins. The wood of the resonance spruce is particularly elastic, transmitting the sound better, and its lymphatic capillaries create resonance like tiny organ-pipes. For the very best instruments, even today centuries-old trees are chosen with care, “listened to” and cared for by woodsmen who care for and protect them generation after generation, passing on a unique know-how.
MASBEDO’s investigation starts from here, from the forests that are home to the Norway spruce from which perfect violins are made. With Symphony of an execution, the artists explore the relationship between death and life, in the passage between two complementarities. The exhibition is a project about rebirth, about the act in power but also about nature, rites and skilled gestures.
The death of the tree leads to the birth of marvellous instruments in which the wood comes back to life. The raw material – rough, irregular and powerful – becomes harmony, lightness, fragility. To arrive at the creation of the sublime, a destructive, heart-wrenching gesture is necessary: an execution. Playing on the linguistic ambivalence of the term, MASBEDO tells how a death sentence is transformed into music, how form is generated from destruction.