Pier Paolo Pasolini. Under the eyes of the world

From 24 September 2022 to 8 January 2023 Villa Manin in Passariano di Codroipo (Udine) and the Pier Paolo Pasolini Study Centre in Casarsa della Delizia (Pordenone) present the exhibition Pier Paolo Pasolini. Under the eyes of the world, curated by Silvia Martín Gutiérrez, organised by ERPAC – Ente Regionale per il Patrimonio Culturale del Friuli Venezia Giulia (Regional Agency for the Cultural Heritage of Friuli Venezia Giulia), on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the great Italian artist, poet, writer, intellectual and director.

With more than 170 rare and unpublished portraits of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna, 1922 – Rome, 1975), the exhibition brings to light entire photographic services – hitherto unknown – focusing mainly on great foreign photographers (some of exceptional fame, such as Richard Avedon, Herbert List, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jerry Bauer, Jonas Mekas, Lütfi Özkök, Erika Rabau, Duane Michals, Philippe Koudjina, Marli Shamir and many others) and on the places, moments and encounters that marked Pasolini’s life, restoring his image as a man and artist in the world, fixed forever in dozens and dozens of different poses.

The exhibition, which was created with the important contribution of Cinemazero, stems from a research project conducted for many years in archives around the world by the curator, and developed for the occasion together with Marco Bazzocchi, Riccardo Costantini and Guido Comis with an exceptional scientific committee. Thanks to this research activity, the public will be able to see for the first time some completely unpublished photographic reports: Pasolini’s meeting with Man Ray, to propose him to draw the poster for Salò; Pasolini in Stockholm (a few days before he was killed), to make himself known in the Nobel Prize environment; Pasolini in the South of the world, with Alberto Moravia, Dacia Maraini, Maria Callas.

When Pasolini goes in search of otherness, of anomaly, which he then reconstructs on the sets of his films. Or at film festivals and other occasions, where he met and debated with intellectuals and filmmakers of his calibre such as Orson Welles, Agnès Varda, Jonas Mekas and Jean-Luc Godard.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was probably the most photographed artist of the 20th century. From the early 1950s, when he arrived in Rome, until the days before his death, he was captured in hundreds of situations, both public and private, as if the photographic lens had chased him every moment of his life. The curiosity surrounding Pasolini as a man and artist has unleashed cameras all over the world.

Each photo shoot dedicated to him implies a particular aspect of the place and time in which the writer finds himself. Each photograph portraying him constitutes ‘a world’.

Pier Paolo Pasolini placed at the centre of his work the places where the rules of the western bourgeois world do not dominate: Friuli, the suburbs of Rome and the South, the unexplored continents, the great modern cities, from Paris to New York. And photographers have portrayed him precisely in these places, ‘where joy is joy and pain pain’, as he wrote in Gramsci’s Ashes (1957).

Thus a secret struggle has arisen between the writer and the camera: when he is in domestic spaces, Pasolini assumes the role of the intellectual who sits at his desk or of the adult son who is not ashamed to always present himself side by side with his mother; when he is in distant worlds, however, he concentrates the force of the lenses on himself, filling each shot with his physicality. In a way, he makes them even stranger through himself. Each photographer has emphasised this relationship in different ways: a writer who shows himself in elegant bourgeois clothes but also in a tank top and swimming costume, a face that seems – at times – to smile but also to look fiercely at the world, as if to challenge it, eyes that capture the lens but also gently submit to the click of the diaphragm.

The exhibition tells us with photographs and numerous multimedia materials that Pasolini’s shots can never construct a logical, coherent whole: he is ready to challenge the idea of photography as a souvenir image, as a moment of time fixed once and for all. This ‘always’ does not apply to Pasolini. The exhibition at Villa Manin, with the complementary sections of the Pier Paolo Pasolini Study Centre in Casarsa della Delizia, aims to propose different nuclei made up of photographic reports that only in appearance seem to follow a development but in reality show us how any chronological definition of ‘that’ moment or ‘that’ period is impossible. Nuclei that expose ‘micro’ worlds (a house, a trip, a festival, a social occasion…) that become ‘macro’ in testifying to his – always very personal and original – crossing of history and the society in which he lives. Dense, full, living worlds in which the spectator is called upon to participate, dialoguing – if possible – with Pasolini’s gaze. In Trastevere in 1953, in Paris in 1961, in New York in 1966 and again in 1969, in Berlin during the festival, in Stockholm a few days before he was killed… Pasolini is always ‘different’: different from how we would expect to see him, ‘other’ from how even great authors such as Avedon or Cartier-Bresson thought of fixing him with their lens.

So Pasolini subjected himself, exposed himself, but also hid himself through photography, the only expressive technique he never spoke of except in very brief hints.

This is also why the exhibition at Villa Manin presents, in addition to the photographs, other documents – newspapers, statements, interviews, videos – to contextualise the occasions on which the photo shoots were born. And then makes Pasolini’s voice heard, with unpublished audio sequences, as a further tool to make present, or attempt to make present, an author who is always ‘on the run’: on the run from himself, on the run from the world, on the run through the words and images of his writings and films.

The Pier Paolo Pasolini Study Centre will present the itinerary on Pasolini’s Roman homes.

From April 1954 to June 1959 the poet lived with his mother in the house in Via Fonteiana 86, in the Monteverde district. He later moved to the flat in Via Giacinto Carini 45, from which he moved in 1963 to finally settle in the house in Via Eufrate 9 in the EUR district.

These changes are reflected in the shots presented in Casarsa. The photographers documenting the houses in Via Fonteiana and Via Carlini (Marisa Rastellini, Elio Sorci and Pietro Pascuttini) allow us to enter the poet’s study and observe him at his typewriter, surrounded by letters, documents, film scripts. We see the paintings on the walls and, in one case, the organza curtains at the window overlooking a small terrace. A few years later, the house in Via Eufrate, furnished with 19th-century furniture on which exotic knick-knacks reminiscent of trips to Africa or India, velvet sofas, carpets, provide the backdrop for a Jerry Bauer photo shoot, one of the most interesting to get to know the intimacy of the poet, immortalised with his mother and closest friends.

The exhibition Pier Paolo Pasolini. Under the eyes of the world wants to take us to the place where Pasolini was formed as a poet, Friuli, all the places where his unstoppable evolution took place: from Friuli to the World, Pasolini still looks at us and challenges us from the walls of these rooms, always ‘fleeing from photography’.