Le due differenti
fasi della tensione
—

On November 14, 1974, barely a year before his assassination, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote his famous “corsair writing” entitled “Cos’è questo golpe? Io so” (What is this coup? I know) in the newspaper Corriere della Sera.

In the context of the convulsive Italian Years of Lead the author claimed to know “the names of those who controlled the two different – in fact, opposite – phases of tension,” referring to the names behind the authorship (material and intellectual) of the massacres that had been orchestrated up to that time.

To underline the premonitory character of Pasolini’s writing, this artwork alludes to the Piazza Fontana (December 12, 1969) and Bologna Central Station (August 2, 1980) bombings, a macabre parenthesis that largely sustains all the violence of that period.

The neon sign that makes up Le due differenti fasi della tensione [The two different phases of tension] was produced in the context of the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth and is based on a fragment of the aforementioned “corsair writing”, reproducing the typography of its author’s typewriter, the Olivetti Lettera 22. 

The light of the artwork remains off throughout the day, except for the period between 4:37 p.m. and 10:25 a.m., the respective times of the aforementioned attacks. In a little poetic gesture intended to shed light on such infamous acts, the disturbing phrase will remind us during the daylight hours that the strategia della tensione was, above all, a political operation.