Elisabetta Benassi


Marina Sorbello: At this year’s Berlin Biennale, you presented You’ll never walk alone (2000) and Timecode (2000), two videos projected onto facing walls in the same room. In the first video, you score a goal against a Pier Paolo Pasolini look-alike, and in the second one you drive him around on a motorcycle...

Elisabetta Benassi: In You’ll never walk alone, I imagined a soccer game in a deserted stadium between my alter ego, Bettagol, and a man who bore an amazing resemblance to Pasolini. In Timecode, the same characters ride around the outskirts of Rome on a motorcycle on a trip that is also an intimate, infinite dialogue. By showing the videos on opposite walls, spectators find themselves at the very center of the action, required to move from one part of the exhibit space to the other. I was interested in the idea of working with a look-alike, someone who, while having his own life, at the same time calls to mind the life of another. I also liked the idea of using familiar images, such as a motorbike ride and a soccer game.

Marina Sorbello: What significance does the Pier Paolo Pasolini reference have?

Elisabetta Benassi: The idea is to bring about a coming together of two generations, of a meeting between a contemporary artist and a key figure from our cultural history. This is Pasolini seen through my eyes, his past brought here into my present. The videos place the two characters at the center of the action, in the midst of an intensely real experience. There is no hint of nostalgia here. In other words, I meet Pasolini and make him the main character of a plausible story, but one that only becomes real when I create it. For the music in You’ll never walk alone I used Uccellacci e Uccellini as my source, because it is a film about the end of ideology and about disenchantment. I thought it was interesting to relate those themes to the role and the position of the artist in contemporary society…


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 86, Summer 2001.




Marina Sorbello