Pier Paolo Pasolini. EVERYTHING IS SACRED

October 19, 2022 > February 26, 2023

To mark the 100th anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth (Bologna, 5 March 1922 – Rome, 2 November 1975), the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo di Roma, the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica – Palazzo Barberini and the MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo will be celebrating this film director, writer and artist in their respective museums with a major, shared and coordinated exhibition entitled Pier Paolo Pasolini. Everything Is Sacred. 
The project is curated and coordinated by: Michele Di Monte, Giulia Ferracci, Hou Hanrou, Giuseppe Garrera, Flaminia Gennari Santori, Cesare Pietroiusti, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, Clara Tosi Pamphili; with Olivier Saillard (for the “Costumes” section of the exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni)

Pier Paolo Pasolini. EVERYTHING IS SACRED 19 October 2022__26 February 2023
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The exhibition due to run at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni from 19 October 2022 to 26 February 2023, entitled Pier Paolo Pasolini. Everything Is Sacred. The body poetic and curated by Giuseppe Garrera, Cesare Pietroiusti, Clara Tosi Pamphili and Olivier Saillard (co-curator for the section devoted to costumes) – comprises exclusively original material consisting of a careful selection of over 700 pieces making up an innovative “corporal” portrait of the great Italian thinker: vintage photographs, period newspapers, first editions of books, magazines carrying his first interviews, articles, essays, typescripts, mimeographs, films, records, tapes and over 100 stage and film costumes in an exhibition in which everything speaks of love for things and bodies in the name of the sacred nature of reality.

Alberto Moravia, Dacia Maraini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Maria Callas  |  Polaroid. Archivio Fotografico di Dacia Maraini
Pier Paolo Pasolini sitting on the stairs of the terrace of his house, July 1960  | © AF Archivi Farabola

Articles from magazines and dailies of the period are displayed in the moving integrity of their original appearance and “incarnation” in the world. Thus the source for each quote is not simply indicated, it is displayed in all its tangible reality. See, for example, the complete copy of the 19 January 1975 edition of «Corriere della sera» carrying Pasolini’s article “against abortion”, an ephemeral object yet with a content and a history that are still explosive today.   

In this exploration, alongside newspapers and magazines, the book as an object becomes a powerful embodiment of the word and in fact may well play the most important role in Pasolini’s corpus, ranging from his adolescent dream of printing his own book of poems (self-funded, artisanal, naive, wonderful) right up to his major publications, the collections that marked the onset of fame and notoriety. Pasolini’s passion for publishing books is linked to his interest in disseminating thoughts, visions and torments in an ongoing dialogue with people, with the public, with the hoi polloi – a dialogue built from 1965 to 1975 in columns, interviews and a ceaseless string of essays in dailies and weeklies.  

His weekly columns in «Vie Nuove» (“Dialogues with Pasolini”) and «Tempo» (first “Chaos” and then “Readings”) right up to his cooperation with «Corriere della sera» paint a clear picture of Pasolini the eternal “corsair”. His entire output as a journalist can be seen as a fantastic medley of thought and struggle: it is in dialogue, in encounters with others that the most poetic bodily experience takes place.  

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Through Pasolini’s work we spy the miracle of the diversity of people’s faces and of anarchist thought; the sacred nature of the feminine, of negritude, of the South perceived as a horizon of otherness and of salvation. We feel the wild, barbarous and extreme force of Pasolini’s words and the cruel taunts that he suffered for being different; his love and yearning for untamed tongues, for dialects and patois, for the gradual disappearance of the people’s voices and songs caused by television standardisation; for the clothing that has disappeared from the land and for the central role of poverty as a real human dimension pitted against the alienating unreality spawned by the consumer society.  

 

The exhibition is broken down into seven thematic sections: Face – People are Saints; Mockery – The Language of the Fathers; Feminine – The Sacred of Which We Are Robbed; Clothes – The Costumes of the Body; Voices – Of the People and the Poet; Friendly Football Match. Real Italy, Out of the Darkness; Rome – The City in the Street; Rome – Conspiratorial Sodom.  
The heart of the exhibition is the Palazzo delle Esposizioni’s Rotunda, which has been transformed into a large reading room containing numerous editions of books on and by Pier Paolo Pasolini which freely are available for visitors to browse and to leaf through.    

 

The special projects on display include a vinyl record produced by Bomba Dischi in conjunction with project sponsor Gucci, with Ariete, Franco126, CLAVDIO, Giorgio Poi, POP X & Giacomo Laser paying tribute to the “pop songs” written and loved by Pasolini, which can be listened to for the entire duration of the exhibition. 
 

 
The event is part of the PPP100-Roma Racconta Pasolini programme promoted by Rome the Capital City – Department of Cultural Affairs with the coordination of the Department of Cultural Activities.