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?
Overview
Presented at MAMbo for the first time, this installation interrogates the semiotic function of avant garde artworks in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). By isolating the Futurist canvases that populate the villa’s interiors, the work explores the friction between avant-garde utopianism and its historical relation with the fascist regime.
The project takes as its point of departure the dialectic between the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics, a concept famously articulated by Walter Benjamin. While the avant-garde—exemplified by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—proclaimed to revolutionize human perception, Pasolini’s Salò frames these works as silent instruments for state-sanctioned cruelty. This installation qustions whether these paintings function as passive witnesses or as active structural components of the fascist regime.
Methodology: de-figuring the frame
Utilizing high-resolution scans provided and authorized by the Cineteca di Bologna, the work performs a “cinematographic excavation.” By digitally excising the figures—both victims and perpetrators—the focus shifts from background to foreground.
Through AI-augmented temporal stretching and subtle motion processing, the static film frame is transformed into a liminal space between still and motion, and between photography and cinema. This manipulation forces a confrontation with the “ominous void”: the rooms are no longer mere backgrounds but are revealed as psychological and claustrophical containers where high culture (invoked through the text of Baudelaire, Barthes, and Klossowski) is weaponized as a tool of class legitimization.
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 from the Archivio Luce of Mussolini’s speeches)—reifies the atmospheric tension.
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
