WHO IS ME – Returning to the Wounded Body
PASOLINI 50 YEARS LATER – November 2, 1975

At the heart of the tenth edition of Rome Art Week (RAW 2025) comes to life WHO IS ME – Returning to the Wounded Body, an event celebrating fifty years since the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the most lucid and controversial intellectuals of twentieth-century Italy.

Through a national premiere theatrical performance and an award-winning film screening, the project conveys the complexity and contemporary relevance of a figure who continues to question and challenge our present.

The project is curated by Roberta Melasecca, Lucia Bendia, Elia Castello, and Sergio Mario Illuminato.

WHO IS ME – Returning to the Wounded Body is an initiative by IOSONOVULNERABILE.

PROGRAM

Museo di Villa Altieri – Rome
Thursday, October 23, 2025 – 6:00 PM

• National premiere of the theatrical performance “WHO IS ME”
  with Lucia Bendia – Dramaturgy by Elia Castello and Lucia Bendia

• Special screening of the short film “Vulnerare”
  by Sergio Mario Illuminato, filmed in 2024 inside the former Papal Prison of Velletri, winner of Best Director and Best Experimental Film at festivals in New York and Los Angeles.

WHO IS ME – The Body and the Word of Pasolini

Written in the summer of 1966 and published posthumously in 1980, edited by Enzo Siciliano, Who is me is a fragmentary, autobiographical, and radical text.

Pasolini conceived it as an imaginary interview addressed to an American audience that knew the director but ignored the man, the poet, and the polemicist.

The result is a “bio-bibliographical poem”, where life and work merge: youthful poetry, prose, and cinema become stages of a single restlessness.

Lucia Bendia’s performance is not a re-enactment but a return to Pasolini’s wounded body: an act of exposure and vulnerability that questions the relationship between art, identity, flesh, and thought.

VULNERARE – The Wound as a Place of Revelation

The short film Vulnerare, directed by Sergio Mario Illuminato, is a powerful visual work.
Filmed in a symbolic place of pain and confinement – the former Papal Prison of Velletri – it transforms the space of constraint into a temple of human fragility.

Through black-and-white imagery and performative sequences, the film reflects on the relationship between body, art, and vulnerability: an essential and poetic language that dialogues with Pasolini and the central theme of the project – the wound as a possibility of truth.

ROME ART WEEK 2025 – Rome, an Open City for Art

With 900 participants, 195 venues, 621 artists, 84 curators, 316 events, and 5 tours, the tenth edition of Rome Art Week confirms the vitality of the Roman art scene and its international openness.
An ecosystem that promotes research, expressive freedom, and dialogue between memory and contemporaneity.

Within this context, WHO IS ME – Returning to the Wounded Body stands as one of the most intense and symbolic events: a direct encounter with Pasolini’s legacy, where the body—tortured and poetic—remains today a metaphor for our inability to embrace diversity, restlessness, and freedom.

Curators: Lucia Bendia, Elia Castello, Roberta Melasecca, Sergio Mario Illuminato
Production: Teatro Valmisa, Movimento VulnerarTe APS, Associazione Culturale Blowart
In collaboration with: Museo di Villa Altieri – Viale Manzoni 47, 00185 Rome RM
Official event of the 10th edition of Rome Art Week 2025
On the 50th anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini