Description
PETROLIO
It is 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 most of all as a man. It goes hand in hand with Salò (or the 120 Days of Sodom), his latest 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 Petrolium is “only” a draft, unfinished, even published posthumously by twenty years and which certainly must have reflected 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 greater 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 are of strong interest to 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 being released into space in different poses in the foreground, second and third planes, as in Pasolini’s cinematic shots. In this key I would also like 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 girls and the murder of Feltrinelli, with her body also found in a marginal place where nature and industry mix. I would also like to take pictures in his beloved Rome at Lido di Ostia, on the outskirts of the city of Rome, where he loved to portray the suburbs. As I have found through and through the bibliography and citation selection exercise, Petroleum will be an absolutely essential source of words for me 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 seek a new key, without, of course, distorting the intent of the manuscript: that is, to deeply criticize contemporary society.
