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Pier Paolo Pasolini. Non mi lascio commuovere dalla fotografia.
25 February 2022
Pier Paolo Pasolini was probably the most acute and controversial intellectual of the late twentieth century in Italy. Writer, columnist, journalist and director, he has deployed his thoughts in a multitude of works and documents and his intellectual legacy makes him one of the key figures of the national and international cultural debate of the second post-war period.
Close to the centenary of his birth (Bologna, 1922), the exhibition aims to remember the figure of Pier Paolo Pasolini and the various cultural experiences of his career, through a different interpretation: photography. Pasolini has in fact been photographed many times during his artistic career, and many of these shots have now become iconic images of the poet. The exhibition presents a long and passionate photographic survey of Pasolini’s portraits and metaphorically his face, his skin, his figure become the privileged space to understand his poetics. From childhood and youth, and in particular from the Friulian period, to the last photographs taken by Dino Pedriali in 1975, the year of his death, the exhibition project unfolds in a chronological path that allows, through the images and other documents that they accompany, to understand the poetics, the social commitment, the literary choices of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
A complex corpus of photographs, with different approaches and sensibilities, in which the chosen photographers are called to play the delicate role of witnesses and creators of archetypes in the poet’s life. Just to name a few: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Letizia Battaglia, John Phillips, Mario Dondero, Paolo Di Paolo, Mimmo Cattarinich, Dino Pedriali, Ugo Mulas, Franco Vitale, André Morain and many others.
Through these portraits, Pasolini’s face becomes the “atlas” to read his work, his personality and his thoughts, and at the same time try to reveal the human and personal aspects of that ineffable man, murdered at Lido di Ostia in circumstances that are still unclear.