Embodying Pasolini | Olivier Saillard – Tilda Swinton

“Lacrimae rerum” ("[there are] tears of [or for] things"): the meaning of this Latin dictum is called to surface by the special performance-contemporary ritual “Embodying Pasolini,” as the costumes and the props in the films of the unforgettable Pier Paolo Pasolini, as unconventionally they are revealed to us and lay ripe for discovery, can genuinely bring tears to our eyes.

At once a ritual-like fashion show and an absolutely idiosyncratic tribute to the great nonconformist filmmaker, poet, and activist Pier Paolo Pasolini—who was brutally murdered in 1975 at the age of 53—is the original performance-live installation conceived by fashion curator Olivier Saillard and British Oscar-winner actress Τilda Swinton, constant artistic collaborators throughout the years. High fashion meets high art, with the androgynous body of Tilda Swinton as a canvas, on which unfurls and registers as real a collection of more than thirty costumes and props designed by Danilo Donati during the 1960s and 1970s and crafted by atelier Farani for the films of the Italian director.

Costumes and props that are works of art in and of themselves: from the biblical costume of Herod in “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” in 1964, inspired by the caftans of the Bedouin tribe and dyed in emerald green—as if it jumped out from a painting of El Greco—to the entirely handmade and adorned with feathers and shells costume and crown worn by Silvana Mangano in her role as Queen Jocasta in 1967’s “Oedipus Rex” and from there to the clothes and props of the exotic “Arabian Nights” and the sweeping “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.”

Only in this case, Swinton herself, like a silent window-shop mannequin, wears the costumes one by one, for all to see. Captured behind the fabric, she does not interpret the roles of the actors who wore them first. Instead, her role is precisely the absence of any role, revealing another costume, an orphan one, disentangled from the body, the actors, and the films, a costume with the capacity to stir emotions as it flashes in its hieratic detachment.