Cimitero Pasolini, a project by Spanish academic and artist Ricard Huerta, opens at Galleria Studio Cenacchi in Bologna on Friday 6 October 2023 at 6 pm and runs throughout October and November.

Huerta has long worked across art, education and cultural research. Cimitero Pasolini is the latest, though not the final, chapter in an ongoing project that brings together two subjects: monumental cemeteries around the world and intellectual figures closely connected with the cities in which each exhibition takes place.

Following a 2022 project in Palma de Mallorca devoted to the philosopher Ramon Llull, the Bologna chapter brings the Certosa Monumental Cemetery into dialogue with Pier Paolo Pasolini. The writer, filmmaker and intellectual was born 101 years ago in Bologna’s Santo Stefano district, only a short distance from Galleria Studio Cenacchi.

Huerta is also the author of Cementerios para educar (2021), a study of cemeteries as places of memory, culture and learning. Through this artistic project, he seeks to draw attention to the extraordinary cultural heritage they preserve. Art and writing are central to this approach, as is the involvement of universities and schools.

Cimitero Pasolini has three complementary elements.

The first is Huerta’s own work: more than 20 photographs taken inside Bologna’s Certosa Monumental Cemetery, accompanied by a similar number of watercolours on paper inspired by Pasolini’s writing.

The second is a participatory project involving students, teaching staff and other employees of the University of Bologna. Participants are invited to submit a photograph of a cemetery that holds particular meaning for them, together with a short description. A selection of these photographs will be printed and displayed as part of the exhibition.

The third takes the project online, extending its artistic and educational reach through the MOdE website. The Museo Officina dell’Educazione is a digital museum that collects, catalogues and presents both tangible and intangible material relating to educational culture.

The watercolours shown alongside Huerta’s photographs of the Certosa are directly inspired by Pasolini’s poem Morte di un fanciullo (Death of a Child), included in his collection Poesie in April 1945. Pasolini dedicated the poem to Giuseppe Favret, a nine-year-old boy from Casarsa della Delizia who died in the summer of 1944.

Un cementerio es un manjar tipográfico — ‘A cemetery is a typographical feast’ (Cementerios para educar, p. 196). Huerta uses this striking image to describe one of the reasons cemeteries hold such fascination for him.

It is precisely this wealth of lettering, inscriptions and graphic forms that finds its way into the watercolours on display. Each work incorporates a passage from Pasolini’s poem, but the words are only one element. Other signs and graphic traces emerge through the fields of colour, scattered across the paper to create a contemporary interplay of image, language and colour.

At the heart of this wide-ranging project is a long-standing ambition of Huerta’s: to encourage people to discover the monumental cemeteries of their own cities in all their complexity, while at the same time deepening their understanding of an important local intellectual figure.

In Bologna, the connection is particularly strong. Pasolini’s poetry — and Morte di un fanciullo in particular — Huerta’s artworks and the Certosa Monumental Cemetery come together in a dialogue between memory, place, language and image.

Ricard Huerta
Cimitero Pasolini
Curated by Chiara Panciroli
6 October > 10 November 2023

1 November (All Saints’ Day): closed

GALLERIA STUDIO CENACCHI
Via Santo Stefano 63
40125 Bologna

OPENING HOURS
Tuesday–Saturday: 4.30–7.30 pm
Monday: by appointment
Sunday: closed