ROMAISON presents EMBODYING PASOLINI

Rome, June 24th, 2021 – An invitation to an artist’s workshop, where a performance is born and takes shape starting from the costumes, the narrative element and alter ego of the body that wears and interprets them. Forty costumes designed by Danilo Donati for the films directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini are the starting point and the sensitive core around which Olivier Saillard and Tilda Swinton have imagined Embodying Pasolini, the world premiere of which will take place in Rome at the spaces of the Mattatoio today, June 25th, 2021.

“Romaison continues to narrate the magic of the link between cinema and fashion in the Capital, evoking the dream of films d’auteur and costume ateliers that represent local excellence. With Embodying Pasolini, a performance conceived and interpreted by Tilda Swinton and Olivier Saillard, whom I thank for choosing Rome, we begin to pay homage to this immense artist, director and intellectual, one year after the centenary of his birth. It is an important step within the project that we are carrying out to enhance a unique in the world city system, which renders Rome the capital of creativity, art, cinema, and high-level craftsmanship. Rome is a laboratory of research and experimentation that brings international directors and productions, costume professionals and scholars, and, more in general, the many protagonists of the world-famous Made in Italy quality to the city itself. Rome starts anew from its excellences, and Italy starts anew with Rome”, says the Mayor of Rome Virginia Raggi.

Embodying Pasolini is a performance that expresses the artistic immortality of the cultured artisanal object. The costumes that translated the poetic and cinematographic vision of Pier Paolo Pasolini come to life, demonstrating the value of the Archive as a source of inspiration, but also as a place for the collection of works that then become available to new, contemporary visions.

The event is part of the ROMAISON program, a project dedicated to the relationship between costume and fashion. The program is strongly supported by the Mayor of Roma Capitale, Virginia Raggi, organised by Zétema Progetto Cultura and curated by the fashion historian Clara Tosi Pamphili. ROMAISON anticipates the celebrations for the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth, choosing Testaccio as its specific setting, one of the neighbourhoods most linked to Pasolini’s imagination and present in many of his works, from the collection of poems Le Ceneri di Gramsci to the final scenes of the film Accatone. Celebrations that in 2022 will involve the whole city, starting with a large exhibition spread over three locations: Palazzo delle Esposizioni, the MAXXI, and the Barberini Corsini National Galleries.

Thus, in the path of enhancement and study of the productions of the Roman Costume Ateliers and their incredible archives, traced by ROMAISON, and with a view to the internationalization of this excellence, Embodying Pasolini creates a deep bond with Rome. It is a project born in the city during a stay by Saillard and Swinton at Villa Medici, and is intimately and creatively connected to Rome.

The costumes created and preserved by Sartoria Farani, the wooden hat blocks from the Laboratorio Pieroni, which like silent presences are present on scene throughout the performance, the Mattatoio (ex-slaughterhouse) itself, which has become an exhibition space hosting the action, are the emblems of a creativity that – renewing itself in form and in keys of expression – continuously reinvents itself and tirelessly regenerates content and container.
Olivier Saillard – a recognized fashion historian, the former director of the Galliera Museum in Paris, and world-renowned fashion curator – and Tilda Swinton – an icon of international cinema, awarded with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2020 – set out to imagine the spaces of Pavilion 9 as an artist’s atelier. It is a place in the making, with work tables, and where the performance is built as action and emotion before the eyes of the audience called to participate in it.

The costumes, taken from films such as The Gospel According to Matthew, Uccellacci e Uccellini, Oedipus Rex, Porcile, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights, and Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, recreate an unprecedented dramaturgy. “Emptied” of the bodies of the actors, the costumes evoke an absence. An absence that Tilda Swinton will fill, trying on the costumes again and again, lending her body, her thoughts, and her experience each time to a different story. In this story “the base is the shoulders and the moulding is the flesh,” as Olivier Saillard writes, underlining the paradox on which the performance is anchored, physicality as opposed to the exploration of absence.

Silent witnesses, the costumes have their own history, identifying with the character that is added in mirror fashion to that of the performer. That spun by Danilo Donati, the set and costume designer awarded with two Oscars for “Romeo and Juliet” by Franco Zeffirelli and for “Il Casanova” by Federico Fellini, respectively in 1969 and 1977, is a fantastical narration made of textures of thread, fabric, colours and shapes. An extreme and refined experimentation, carried out in Donati’s partnership with Pasolini, beginning in 1962 and continued until the director’s death, through the use of materials such as wool, cotton, natural fibres, in a myriad of different uses. From the pictorial citations of the frescoes by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo, evoked in The Gospel According to Matthew, to the loom weaving created for Oedipus Rex, to the “cartridge belt” shapes of the soldiers’ costumes of the dream in Porcile, to the rigidity of the felt, to the jubilation of velvets, fringes and laminates in The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights, to the famous dresses worn in Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom.
Almost as if they were prisoners of their own statuary status, the costumes in Embodying Pasolini will be brought to life for the time of a rehearsal: object and subject once again of a new interpretation, each time understood as double, companion and opposite.

Embodying Pasolini is promoted by Roma Capitale, organized by Zétema Progetto Cultura with the collaboration of PalaExpo, and produced by StudiOlivierSaillard with Aymar Crosnier’s coordination. Artistic collaboration by Gaël Mamine.
Many thanks to Massimo Serini for Tilda Swinton’s Hair and Make-up.

EMBODYING PASOLINI
Performance by and with Olivier Saillard and Tilda Swinton
Friday, June 25th, 2021 – from 6 pm to 10 pm

Rome, Mattatoio
Piazza Orazio Giustiniani 4

The event will be broadcast in live streaming on www.romaison.it
Info www.romaison.it