Silvia Mazzini

Vita

Silvia Mazzini studied Philosophy and Theatre Sciences in Milan. Her MA thesis in Aesthetics investigated the role of Tension in Goethe's Faust. In her PhD (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) she analyzed the points of intersection between Gianni Vattimo's weak-thought and Ernst Bloch's utopic philosophy of hope, in order to give a new interpretation of their political and aesthetic ideas. Next to her academical research (aesthetics, rhetoric, political and utopian thought, community theatre, urban space), she teaches courses at the HU Berlin and the Munich University of Applied Sciences. She is co-founder of IF, an experimental theatre project in Italy, and works as dramaturg and theater author for different theatre companies.

ICI-Project

The coherence of contradictions in Pier Paolo Pasolini
Starting point of this project about Pier Paolo Pasolini is a thesis: the striking contradictions in his work must be interpreted as a distinguishing mark, and not as a flaw. Pasolini is mostly known as a film director but he was also a poet, novelist, essayist. In his films and writings, he fought against every form of absolutism. That can even be recognized in his style of argumentation, where every thesis evokes simultaneously an antithesis, without building a comforting, absolutistic and "totalitarian" synthesis. While most of Pasolini’s critics defined his work as irrational and incoherent, I intend to show how his ideas are organic and represent a kind of «multistable unity» - but without being a so called "synthesis of opposites". Therefore the goal of my project is a philosophical formulation of Pasolini's thinking, in form of an extended essay.