(Re)Listening to the City's Heart / (Ri)ascolto il tuo cuore città

The essay is a study of MASBEDO's project "Ritratto di città. 20/20.00Hz" as a reenactment of "Ritratto di città" (Portrait of a City, 1954) by Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Roberto Leydi. At a distance of seventy years, the artist duo has revived their predecessors' ars acustica or “art of listening” through a personal reworking. The reenactment, understood as the restaging of an action that does not result in a repetition, but in a variation and thus an opening up of meaning, allows them to update the representation of the city of Milan and forge a link between past and present. As well as sounds, MASBEDO’s reinterpretation entails the sampling of images through video recordings of what they regard as an “aural topography” of the city (the outside) and the Studio di Fonologia itself (the inside), where Berio and his companions did their work.