JOHN DI STEFANO
JE ME SOUVIENS [2002]
Time-based media / installation / bookwork & texts
JE ME SOUVIENS [2002] is an exhibition that is part of the PASOLINI PROJECT, an extended critical meditation on the life and work of Italian filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. As a politically engaged artist and openly gay man living in the tumultuous Italy of the 1960s and '70s, Pasolini became synonymous with scandal and 'otherness' despite the fact that he was highly respected as an artist and intellectual. He was assassinated in 1975 leaving behind a rich and varied body of filmic and written work. The PASOLINI PROJECT investigates and examines Pasolini’s works, texts and images, from which discrete, often installation-based artworks are created in an attempt to reclaim his 'otherness'. As a first-generation Italian-Canadian, the artist’s relationship with Pasolini is not that of a biographer, but that of a translator who shares a cultural and linguistic background with the filmmaker. The works that constitute the project thus implicitly also function as critical commentaries on identity and politics in their negotiation of the complexities of cultural translation and acculturation.
SHOWN:
Galerie Articule. Montréal, Canada
A Space, Toronto, Canada (in conjunction with Images International Film Festival)
The installation consists of the following discrete works:
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THEOREM [2002/2015] Video / mixed media
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VOLGAR ELOQUIO [2002/2015] Video / mixed media (variable)
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SENZA PAROLE [2002/2015] Video / mixed media (variable)
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TENEBRE [2002] Polaroid photographic prints
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CENERE [2002] Video / mixed media (variable)
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NOVEMBER 2, 1975 [2002/2003] Unbound artist book - kodalith photographic prints / mixed media
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PICTURING PASOLINI (VERSION) [2002] Kodalith photographic prints
VIEW: For an overview see the 'Pasolini Project' (1990-2022) https://vimeo.com/780519096
WRITING
Sherry Simon, Deviant Translations. Articule, Montréal, 2002
Will Kwan, Another Version: John Di Stefano’s Redeeming Translations. A Space Gallery, Toronto, 2002
REVIEW
Sascha Hastings, ‘Peerless Pier’. Now, Toronto, Canada, 2002