Pier Paolo Pasolini Seeing Otherwise

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a writer and filmmaker deeply rooted in European culture, as well as a public intellectual who moved between different traditions, identities, and languages. Fascinated by peripheries, be it within Italy (in the rural Friuli, the Roman borgate, or Naples) or the Global South (in East Africa, the Middle East, and India), he looked for possible alternatives to the hegemony of western neocapitalism and consumerism. Pasolini’s poetic gaze probed not only different geographies but also disparate temporalities, drawing provocative analogies, and zooming in and out in the constant attempt to unhinge coordinates, hierarchies, and logics. Fifty years after Pasolini’s death, this event explores his multi-scalar aesthetics, its political relevance, as well as its invitation to return the gaze.

Chiara Caradonna is senior lecturer at the Departments of Romance Studies and of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and currently visiting fellow at the the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin. In her research, she explores the intersections between modern and contemporary European literature, continental philosophy, anthropology, photography, and cinema from an ecocritical and decolonial perspective. She has published articles on Pasolini’s reception of the Russian poet Osip Mandel’štam and on his theory and practice of notation across genres. She is the editor of the volume Reorienting Pasolini, forthcoming with ICI Press.

Fabien Vitali is wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the University of Siegen. He obtained his PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa with a dissertation on the essays of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. His extensive work on Pasolini also includes the translation and commentary of Pasolini’s conversations with Jewish film journalist Gideon Bachmann, which were awarded the Translation Prize of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2023 (Pasolini-Bachmann, Gespräche 1963–1975, 2022). He translated into German Pasolini’s dialogues with the readers of the communist magazine Vie Nuove from the 1960s (2025). Since 2025, he has been the editor of the Sefiroth| ספירות series at the Galerie der abseitigen Künste in Hamburg. There he recently published the essay ‘Der Zeit widersprechen’, a study on the performative dimension of Pasolini’s cultural criticism.