Overview exhibition in MAMbo, Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, Italy (2025)
-an introduction and 5 short clips (dimensions of the screens are variable, depending on the given space)
I saw this movie for the first time as an art student long ago. A group of fascists subject 18 young boys and girls to their cruel power for 120 days in a villa, in the puppet state Salò, in the last year of World War 2 in Italy. Besides displayed humiliation, torture, and murder, I was immediately struck by how prominent modernist art, especially futuristic painting, was in this film. As an art student, I always associated avant-garde and modernist art with positivism and progressive world views. Did Pasolini denounce the avant-garde for its collaboration with the fascist regime? Or (I don’t think so) did he consider the avant-garde as a victim, abused by these fascist rulers? There had been a strong relationship between fascism and this avant-garde movement. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the foreman of the futurist movement, called himself an ultra-fascist, and Benito Mussolini, the fascist leader, proclaimed that fascism wouldn’t had this form without the futurist movement. In this project, I aim to take the dialectic between the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics, a concept famously articulated by Walter Benjamin, as a point of departure.
What I do Defiguring the frame. I examine Pasolini’s intentions by editing these frames and stripping them of all atrocities, victims, and perpetrators. The paintings in the background now become foreground. What remain are empty spaces with an ominous atmosphere. The duration of the film-stills is stretched from their original 1/24 second to a much longer timespan. I zoom in on the paintings, and create liminal spaces, as if the viewer is inside the rooms. Through AI-augmented temporal stretching and subtle motion processing, the static film frame is hovering between still and motion, and between photography and cinema.
The text slides show quotes from Charles Baudelaire, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Klossowski, cited by these fascists. They cocooned with high culture, probably as legitimization of their misdeeds.
Sonic and Spatial Presence
The installation expands the two-dimensional frame into an immersive environment. The accompanying soundscape—a collage of environmental field recordings and the “white noise” of history (including fragmented broadcasts of Mussolini’s speeches)—reifies the atmospheric tension.
Total length of the film: In this link, only short clips of each loop are displayed. Five loops are simultaneously playing. The estimated time to see all loops after each other is approx. 20 minutes.
Part of loop 1, The Setting of Violence
Part of loop 2, The Setting of Violence
Part of loop 3, The Setting of Violence
Part of loop 4, The Setting of Violence
Part of loop 5, The Setting of Violence
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Pier Paulo Pasolini on the film set, 1975 (photo: attributed to Deborah Beers)
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Many thanks to the Mondriaan Fund and the Dommering Foundation for their trust in this project
