The sting from two houses. Contradictory identifications that both feel like ‘home’ but pull us in different directions. The simultaneous states of consciousness and unconsciousness expressed in the exhibition title. Pasolini is also frequently characterised as having contradictory identifications, conflicting ideologies and inconsistent styles. (Pasolini liked to refer to himself as the poeta della sineciosi (a ‘poet of the oxymoron’).
Nettles grow within Pasolini’s work, from the poem Gramsci’s Ashes (1957) (…The earth, fertile with nettles and vegetables, brings forth…) to the film, Theorem (1968), where Emilia, the maid, transforms into an agrarian saint capable, after imbibing a broth made with nettles, of healing disease and of levitation.
