PETROLI by Pier Paolo Pasolini _ Enigma

PETROLI · A Documentary Fiction

Production: Grupo Enigma – resident ensemble of the Auditorio de Zaragoza Princesa Leonor.
Co-production: Government of Aragón, Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical, Istituto Italiano di Cultura and Grupo Enigma

Adaptation and concept: Asier Puga (based on Pasolini’s unfinished work)
Music composition: Carles de Castellarnau
Musical direction: Asier Puga
Ensemble Enigma: Antonio Nuez (flute), Emilio Ferrando (clarinet), Víctor Parra (violin), Zsolt G. Tottzer (cello), Juan Carlos Segura (synthesizer)
Narrator: José Miguel Baena
Actor: George Marinov
With the collaboration of: Lola Albiac
Audiovisuals: Asier Puga and Javi Yond
Video design, animation and editing: Javi Yond
Sound engineer: Juanan Ros
Lighting: George Marinov
Puppet design and production: Claudia López and Sergio Herrero
Translation: José Miguel Baena and Asier Puga

Duration: approx. 90 min · Languages: Spanish and Italian with subtitles

Not recommended for audiences under 18. Some material may be disturbing to viewers.

Petroli sets the evening in motion. It was the last work Pier Paolo Pasolini was working on when he was murdered fifty years ago at the Idroscalo in Ostia. Published posthumously in 1992, what remains is a colossal fragment of a project spanning more than 2,000 pages: an encyclopaedia of storytelling, «a modern Satyricon», in the author’s own words, intended to push beyond the limits of the novel and be completed with photographs, sounds, recordings and unusual documentaries to fill its deliberate narrative gaps. Conceived during Italy’s Years of Lead — and shaped by Pasolini’s investigations into ENI, the far right and the secret services — Petroli is at once an initiatory journey, a wild exploration of identity and an X-ray of an Italy that, in modernising, lost far more than it gained. «A wild beast», in Emanuele Trevi’s words.

This creation by Asier Puga, featuring music by Carles de Castellarnau and performed by Ensemble Enigma, approaches the work through sound while embracing its original hybrid nature: spoken word, live music, puppetry and audiovisual elements in a complex interplay between reality and fiction. Yet the evening does not end there. The performance extends into Hor-G and Alba Vinton’s RAVE Pasoliniana, where text gives way to the body and collective impulse, before reaching its epilogue with the techno set by Barolec + INTRVL. From instrumental ensemble to loudspeaker, from score to groove, from spectator to participant.