In his exhibition, Je Me Souviens (I Remember), John Di Stefano engages with the biography of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in order to excise certain questions about the intersection of nationalism and sexuality embedded within the director's work and public life.

Preview at The Moving Image Centre Gallery
Saturday November 1st - 6pm
Until November 29th
In his exhibition, Je Me Souviens (I Remember), John Di Stefano engages with the biography of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in order to excise certain questions about the intersection of nationalism and sexuality embedded within the director's work and public life.

Preview at The Moving Image Centre Gallery
Saturday November 1st - 6pm
Until November 29th
As a politically engaged artist and openly gay man living in the tumultuous Italy of the 1960s and '70s, Pasolini was continuously portrayed as a social outcast, and for this, was exiled throughout his life. His name became synonymous with scandal and 'otherness'. He was assassinated in 1975.
Di Stefano's installation, comprising video projections, photography, and interactive book-works, form a sort of alternative museum, a critical reframing of the public archive of press imagery, film material, and literary production left behind by the slain filmmaker.

As a first-generation Italian-Canadian, Di Stefano's relationship with Pasolini is not that of a quasi-biographer, but that of a translator.
In Je Me Souviens (I Remember), Di Stefano's approach is that of a critical meditation which attempts to appropriate Pasolini's 'otherness' by overlapping (Pasolini's) biography with (his own) autobiography.
For Di Stefano, his strategy is as a means of negotiating the complexity of cultural translation and acculturation in order to suggest that we think of national belonging(s) as porous and fluid, made up of numerous overlapping symbolic and cultural experiences, all modulated with the use, and abuse, of language(s).

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John Di Stefano (BFA, Concordia University, Montreal; MFA, UCLA; PhD, Concordia University, Montreal) is an interdisciplinary artist, videomaker, writer, curator and educator. He is presently Senior Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Studies at Massey University's School of Fine Art (Wellington, New Zealand). His studio work is focused primarily in video, installation, photo-based and time-based media, and has also included performance, bookwork, site-specific and public art projects as well as work in the digital realm. He has exhibited and published internationally since 1985.

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