From 8 July to 4 September 2022 the Palazzo delle Esposizioni will be hosting the first one-man show of work in Italy by German photographer Ruediger Glatz, curated by Alessio de’Navasques and showcasing over 60 black and white photographs devoted to Pier Paolo Pasolini. The exhibition, promoted by Roma Culture and organised by the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, with Tenderstories contribution, is part of the Rome Capital City Cultural Affairs Department’s PPP1000 programme of events coordinated with the Cultural Activities Department.

Adopting a clinical, almost scientific approach that appears to echo a certain German photographic tradition right up to the poetic need to convey reality typical of Subjektive Photographie, Ruediger Glatz takes his measure of the great Italian thinker in a process of rapprochement, refraction and reflection.

Using that unpredictable “magical quality” of photography that Walter Benjamin called “the tiny spark of accident”, Ruediger Glatz has succeeded in recording the strength of absence in a performance entitled Embodying Pasolini, presented in the spaces of the Mattatoio in Rome in June 2021. In an action unfolding in several phases, actress and performer Tilda Swinton and curator and fashion historian Olivier Saillard explored, through the sculptural monumentality of Danilo Donati’s costumes, the memory of Pasolini’s characters who had worn them.

A complete cycle of photographs conjures up the performance experience in the Mattatoio as thought it were a “time room” where Glatz’s lens has managed to capture the magnetism of the action. Through the use of extended or multiple exposures, he uses doubles and reflections to convey the transfiguration of the actress in the pathos of her peformance: the moment of the action and Swinton’s own enigmatic face become a reflecting device, a punctum that fertilises the photographer’s creativity, triggering a process of exploration and familiarisation with Pasolini’s work as a reflection and refraction of that action.

Whence the exhibition title Reflecting Pasolini and the idea for the project, which is completed with the cycle of photographs entitled On PPP: the images of the places that Ruediger Glatz encountered while touring Italy in search of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s imagination in a emotional journey, juxtaposing the past with the present.

Glatz has imparted new depiction and new meaning to the references to the painting of Piero Della Francesca and Giotto in Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo, to the lights of the buildings in the Quadraro and Centocelle in such films as Mamma Roma or Accattone or the shadows of Villa Feltrinelli, Mussolini’s last abode on the shores of Lake Como that inspired Salò.

The essence of the sites, of the solitary landscapes, of nature-culture, like denaturalised spaces, has spawned a personal atlas of myths and emotions in an intimate and literary dimension of such places as the house in Bologna where the poet was born or the Torre di Chia, the beloved retreat where he wrote Petrolio.