Pier Paolo Pasolini Everything Is Holy Il corpo veggente – Palazzo Barberini, Italy

The National Galleries of Ancient Art present the exhibition Pier Paolo Pasolini from 28 October 2022 to 12 February 2023 at Palazzo Barberini . EVERYTHING IS HOLY – The seer body , curated by Michele Di Monte, created within the Pier Paolo Pasolini exhibition project. EVERYTHING IS HOLY coordinated and shared by the National Galleries of Ancient Art with the Palaexpo Special Company of Rome and the MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna, 5 March 1922 – Rome, November 2, 1975).

The choice of the title, Pier Paolo Pasolini. EVERYTHING IS HOLY, is inspired by the sentence pronounced by the wise Chirone in the film Medea (1969), which evokes the mysterious sacredness of the world of the archaic and religious underclass, in sharp conflict with the heroes of a rational, secular, bourgeois world.

Conceived and curated collectively by Michele Di Monte, Giulia Ferracci, Giuseppe Garrera, Flaminia Gennari Santori, Hou Hanru, Cesare Pietroiusti, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, Clara Tosi Pamphili, the exhibition project intertwines disciplines, media, original works and archive documents according to three autonomous guidelines , specific for each location, but designed to be integrated in order to solicit unpublished reflections on Pasolini’s production, on the cultural influence it has exercised and still has on the gaze of those who observe it since the 21st century.

The exhibition of the National Galleries of Ancient Art explores the decisive role of the artistic tradition in Pasolini’s cinema and visual imagery, from Primitives to the Baroque, from the hieratic archaism of Giotto’s painters to the subversive realism of Caravaggio, and the theme of the sacred, which, as the title of the entire review reminds us, it represents the underlying reason for this journey.

Path that develops as a sort of visual “montage”, including paintings, sculptures, photographs and books (for a total of about 140 pieces), illustrating the survival power of images, transfigured by Pasolini’s poetic objective, their charge expressive and emotional, witnesses to the sacred and at the same time worldly mystery of our relationship with reality and with history.

The exhibition is divided into six sections, entitled to the figures of the body, another transversal theme of the exhibition project that unites the three museums involved.

On the occasion of the free evening preview of the exhibition , which will take place at Palazzo Barberini on Thursday 27 October (18.00-21.00), it will be possible to participate in the #pasolinisbodiesandplaces event, a video installation conceived by Benedikt Reichenbach, visible at the nearby Swiss Institute starting at 20.30.