According to ICOM (International Council of Museums) the 5 functions of a museum are: research, acquisition, conservation, communication, exhibition. What could a Pier Paolo Pasolini museum be like?
In a display case we could put his first poem: of those verses the memory of two words remains “rosignolo” and “verzura”. It is 1929. While Mussolini signs the Lateran Pacts, Antonio Gramsci gets pen and paper and begins to write the Quadreni dal Carcere. And so on, as Vincenzo Cerami says: “If we take all of Pasolini’s work from the first poem he wrote when he was 7 years old to the film Salò, his last work, we will have the portrait of Italian history from the end of the years of fascism to the mid-1970s. Pasolini told us what happened in our country in all these years”.
Ascanio Celestini guides us through a hypothetical PASOLINI MUSEUM that, through the testimonies of those who knew him, but also of those who imagined him, loved and hated him, is composed starting from the questions: what is the strong point of the Pasolini Museum? What object should we look for? What object should we commit to acquiring from a private or public collection, recover it from some warehouse, landfill, library or lost property office? What are we required to do to preserve it? What can we communicate through it? And finally: how should we exhibit it?
