Ecce Dominus. Dear Pierpaolo…
Art Action
March 18, 2023 – Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma
text by Ilaria Sileo

The Art Action Ecce Dominus. Dear Pierpaolo… is a performative project by Laura VDB Facchini and curated by the WindMill ART POWER PLANT association held in the Cloister of the garden of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome on March 18, 2023.
Ecce Dominus is part of the project Declinazione femminile/maschile conceived for the Women Visual Artists Database and was born from the need to stimulate a new reflection on what it might mean to be a man in this particular historical period, both from a male and female point of view. The word dominus comes from the feminine noun domus which, in Latin, recalls the concept of home, family, school or place of birth, becoming a metaphor for a common place of origin.
The art action was created on the occasion of the Rassegna Pasoliniana, a series of interdisciplinary cultural initiatives to celebrate the centenary of Pierpaolo Pasolini’s birth and organized as an appendix to the exhibition Pasolini painter at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in the capital. Ecce Dominus is carried out in this context to give the opportunity, to any man or woman involved, to think about what it means to “be male” starting from Pierpaolo Pasolini’s writings.
The action, lasting 10/15 minutes, required each participant to bring a small object, accompanied by a text, representing male identity in the contemporary era. All participants arranged themselves around a central base and, one at a time, took a step forward to display the chosen object on the base and read their text, each with the incipit «Dear Pierpaolo…», as if wanting to dedicate or tell the great Italian intellectual the new rules on being a man today.
Each sequence of the performance was immortalized in a video taken by a cell phone and, later, re-edited in order to translate the entire action into an Art Video capable of reflecting the perceptions of this theme of every future spectator.