PROJECT BY SARA POLI

It is well known that Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Petrolio is his last work, the one that would lay him bare as an artist, as a poet, but above all as a man. It goes hand in hand with Salò (or the 120 Days of Sodom), his last film work, which very much reflects the anti-narrative grammar of Petrolio. A complex encounter of proletariat, underclass and bourgeoisie, where lives intertwine without ever touching. But Petrolio is “only” a draft, unfinished, even published posthumously by twenty years, and which certainly had to reflect a highly complex form of language: but perhaps, if the author had managed to finish it, it might have been more understandable to the public. Have more access to public understanding. Or maybe not. In my project, I will not follow the temporal progression of the writing (in fact, the story is a-temporal, but with a definite line) but will take my cue from indices, even tiny fragments of speech, emotions that that particular sentence, place or character arouses in me. I am beginning a second rereading, and I am marking the parts that arouse strong interest in me, such as the splitting of Charles, who in turn turns into Charles of Tetris and Charles of Polis, thus becoming the image of three men. Nudity will often be present in my images, with a masculinity that very much reflects that of the author: young, childlike, curly, dark men, perhaps with garlands on their heads. The composition of the photographs will be cinematic in nature, with the bodies freeing themselves in space in different poses in the first, second, and third planes, as in Pasolini’s cinematic shots. In this key I also want to emphasize the free and exhibited homosexuality that is present in the book, with bodies close and touching each other. I consider important the structure of the sets in the book that I will report in contemporary form, and how Pasolini in the chapter (itself divided into sub-chapters) “The Shit,” describes colored cubes, scattered in a street on the edge of the city of Rome. The sale of little girls and the murder of Feltrinelli, with his body also found in a marginal place, where nature and industry mix. I would also like to take images in his beloved Rome at Lido di Ostia, on the fringes of the city of Rome, where he loved to portray the suburbs. As I have found through and through the exercise of bibliography and citation selection, Petrolio for me will be an absolutely fundamental source of words to turn into images. But the adherence to the text will not be total, certainly I will take words, but never whole sentences or whole chapters to reproduce perfectly: a word, or two, or a concept that I will try to recreate visually, according to a poetics of my own. It is most important to keep the poet as a reference, but also important to look for a new key, without, of course, distorting the intent of the manuscript: that is, to deeply criticize contemporary society.