From 12 November 2022 to 19 February 2023 Palazzo Pretorio in Cittadella in the province of Padua presents the exhibition The Video is The Massage by the Basmati video duo formed by Audrey Coïaniz and Saul Saguatti , artists engaged for over twenty years in multimedia research projects focused on an unprecedented short circuit between digital culture and more "traditional" techniques (drawings, painting, photography). The exhibition avails itself of the curatorship of Giuseppe Virelli .

The title of the exhibition takes up Marshall McLuhan's essay The Medium is the Massage (1967), in which the famous Canadian culturologist points out how the media influence our way of perceiving the world; in particular the new electronic media , which, by virtue of their intrinsic qualities (fluency, speed and pervasiveness) have given life to the so-called "global village", where the artistic experience expands by invading the spaces in which we live, activating thus new processes of aesthetic perception: “ Ours is an age of overcoming barriers, of eliminating old categories to probe what surrounds us… The means of communication, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique syntheses of sensory perceptions… We are now aware of the possibility of setting up the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception ” (M. McLuhan).

Starting from these concepts, Basmati Video has developed a series of works based on an unprecedented combination of electronic pixel, matter and environment , in which the manual-material layer and the digital-virtual one meet to give life to site-specific video installations .

The computer-processed images and sounds are projected onto very light transparent structures which, suspended in space or floating from the floor, "come alive" like colored ectoplasm ready to capture the viewer and place him at the center of the work, thus immersing him in an unprecedented synesthetic experience .