APPUNTI PER UN'ORESTIADE AFRICANA_a democracy in fatigue

Between 1968 and 1969, Pier Paolo Pasolini shot scenes in Uganda and Tanzania that were to become an African version of Aeschylus' Orestiata, as part of an even larger project: "Notes for a poem about the Third World". This film would feature episodes set in India, Arab countries and South America. The project was never completed, but the recordings - accompanied by Pasolini's commentary - achieved an autonomous expressive validity. With the book of Aeschylus' Orestiade placed on an atlas, right next to the map of Africa, Pasolini begins Appunti per un'Orestiade africana (1970). This shot, which opens and closes the film, sums up what is outlined: the possibility of filming an adaptation of the play set in modern Africa. This is not a documentary in the strictest sense of the word, but rather notes on how to make one. It is a work-in-progress that investigates the possibilities of creation and the elements that are generally left out of a finished work, but which are essential for it to exist. These notes would be something like a documentary about another documentary, although only imagined, since in the end the African Orestiad was never made. Pasolini generates a political essay on the invention of freedom, through a reflection on the post-colonial condition of the African countries. For him, the events recounted by Aeschylus in the Orestiade (458 BC) could constitute the key to interpreting the change of the African people - and more generally, of the peripheries of the world - from a tribal culture to a new form of democratic organisation that would safeguard the popular tradition from the destructive negativity of Western capitalist society. Though, he incurs in a paternalistic, ethnocentric vision: Africa is mistaken for a homogeneous reality, democracy is tacitly presented as the Western model that suits African states best - errors that Pasolini himself will recognize. The primitive, tribal and mythical world is an element that is radically opposed to the logic of Western modernity, and through it Pasolini takes a critical approach to history. From the parallel that Pasolini draws between the first Greek elections and those of independent Africa, he reflects on the contradictions and losses adjacent to the encounter of the two worlds, the archaic and the modern. The Furies in Aeschylus' text are destined to disappear and with them disappears an archaic and primitive world, the world of myths. But in Africa the ancient world survives in the modern world, the power of the past still lives on in the present. Thus, the transformation of the Furies into Eumenides cannot be completely represented, the two worlds coexist, there are Eumenides, but there are also Furies. Pasolini shows us this through a traditional dance and a tribal wedding feast. But even the modern world is a contradictory space, where not only archaic and modern elements coexist, but also socialist and neo-capitalist one. Aeschylus’ Orestiade describes a cycle of deaths and family vendettas, brought to an end by the arrival Pallas Athena’s conciliatory justice, thus ideally creating the first democratic tribunal in History. It is performed in Gibellina (Sicily) in the dreamlike Cretto di Burri, a place that materialises trauma and pain, as in 1968, the small town was devastated by an earthquake, leaving hundreds dead and more than 100,000 people homeless in the region. Memory, violence, pseudo-democracy, war, imaginary, stereotypes. The danger of the single story. Different places and times intertwine in this project to reflect on the creation of knowledge, on the universalisation of the hegemonic discourses of the West, and the invention of freedom. Inspired by the process of (self-)critique that emerges in Pasolini's film as he dialogues with a group of African students, this body of work reflects on the postcolonial gaze/power relations that are in effervescence.