Pasolini: Durations
On view:
November 3 – 14, 2025
Mon-Fri 10-6
On the 50th anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death, artist-filmmakers Cathy Lee Crane and John Di Stefano present a meditation on Pasolini with a series of video-based works presented at NYU’s Casa Italiana.
Pasolini: Durations proposes a poetic and experiential approach to Pasolini’s radical social critique and aims to recontextualize his work within the contemporary moment. Inspired by Pasolini’s ideas about filmmaking as a means of engaging the social and the political, Crane and Di Stefano’s work considers the spatial and temporal relationships of the moving image as a means of revisiting history. In an essayistic manner, Crane and Di Stefano mine Pasolini’s films and writings for resonant moments which they rework through strategies of montage to produce new perspectives. In some works, urban locations evoked by Pasolini’s films and writings serve as catalysts for new, speculative and revised narratives, both documentary and fictional in nature.
The exhibition is accompanied by a special screening of Cathy Lee Crane’s film Pasolini’s Last Words (2012) on November 10, 2025 at 6:00 PM with a reading by Stacy Szymaszek from The Pasolini Book.
Part of the series
Pasolini: Politics & Poetry
Curated by Ara H. Merjian and Mila Tenaglia
On the 50th anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò presents Pasolini: Politics & Poetry, on the fiftieth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death. The artist endures as a figure of controversy and contradiction, yet this milestone demands more than commemoration: it calls for a critical interrogation of his literary and cinematic oeuvre—vast, fractured, and unruly—alongside the political and intellectual commitments that continue to resist facile categorization. Curated by Professor and author Ara H. Merjian and creative producer Mila Tenaglia, the program runs from November 3 to 14 and pursues a multidisciplinary engagement with Pasolini’s work, traversing the languages of music, cinema, theater, and scholarly inquiry. Rather than merely honoring his legacy, the initiative seeks to restore the vitality and provocation of his thought and poetics, with particular attention to how contemporary artists and scholars have reinterpreted, contested, and claimed his intellectual and artistic inheritance. Pasolini: Politics & Poetry extends beyond screenings of Pasolini’s films—drawn from cinetecas, the Criterion Collection, and the Archivi Luce—to embrace works by directors and filmmakers who have discovered in his vision a wellspring for creative dialogue. This convergence of past and present positions the initiative not as a nostalgic ritual but as a living encounter with one of the twentieth century’s most formidable intellectuals, enriched by performances, a video installation exhibition, conversations, and academic interventions. Pasolini’s death—among the most notorious and contested episodes in Italian history—was not simply the murder of a homosexual man, but an event in which politics, literature, and society collided in ways that remain unresolved.
