bianco papa-tredicimaggiottantuno

The years of John Paul the Second’s papacy have shown how much the Church has become a part of the media agenda and the extent to which the pope took advantage of this, so much so that we can call it a true ‘communication revolution’. However, although the figure of Pope John Paul II tends to take centre stage in any reflection on the relationship between the Church, the Media and image, it is also true that in the first half of the 19th century the pope started to become the subject of the indiscrete gaze of the lens (from photography to the film camera and then from the news camera to the webcam),  reaching a visual climax with the television, which since its origins has devoted space and given a special focus to the figure of the pope.
While Pius VII was the first pope whose image was captured on a glass plate in 1822, Leo XIII was the first to experiment with the potential of the moving image, as he was filmed in 1896 in the Vatican Gardens in the act of blessing. The audiovisual language transforms the gesture of benediction into a polysemic sign that was until that time unknown: the benediction of the device becomes the benediction of the spectators who would watch the sequence in another space and time. It is the foundation of a true “archetype of religious cinematographic imagery” that also paves the way for a precise, new construction of the image of the pope, who now becomes a real exportable icon.  In centuries past the only opportunity the faithful had to see the pope was through official iconography. Few could make the long and costly journey to Rome. The photographic images that began to circulate in the second half of the 19th century, the devotional images and then the film and television sequences became new propaganda vehicles for faith, which all the popes had to deal with and, in various ways, use.
In this exhibition visual documentation becomes an essential source for observing small but significant changes in the most visible aspects that often precede or sometimes follow a development in the Church and its teaching. The corporeity of the pontiff and the sacred aura of men of power and their images (including the media in general) are very eloquent. The photographic and television sequences of Pope John XXIII effectively show, for example, the “the decay of the omnipotent image of the pope” that we were used to in the past and call into question both his public function and, in a broader sense, that of the Church itself in the world.

A historic video installation on the assassination attempt of Pope John Paul II
A work created and put together at fscire.it

The minutes around 5.19 pm on May 13th 1981 contain a plurality of different interpretations; all linked by an intricate interpretative theory that rests on the shots that seriously injured John Paul II during his tour of St. Peter’s Square before Wednesday’s general papal audience.
The installation “tredicimaggiottantuno” aims to present these layers in a single vision. It aims to link the moment John Paul II risked his life and definitively lost his overwhelming physical vigour to the typically Wojtylian teaching of the ‘act’ and to dialogue with the memory of the event, as the faithful with their cameras, the news cameras and reporters recounted, breaking down comprehension and representation on surfaces and screens that surround the off-road vehicle around and in which the Pope’s assassination attempt was played out.
The sides of a 1981 Fiat Campagnola, abandoned for years and given a new lease of life for the occasion, become the screens on which beamers will project a composite image that combines audio images from the attempt: all around several television screens present overlapping accounts of the interpretations, the events and the investigations surrounding this failed assassination.
There are some who immediately tried to connect the event to the bloody decade in which Rome was the centre of international and political terrorism. The immediate arrest of a young Turk, Ali Agca, instantly recognised as the perpetrator, seemed to point in that direction. But legal, political, historical and journalistic theories soon surrounded his movements and the possible forces behind his actions: theories of both East and West were considered and some remembered that not many months before the shots in St. Peter’s Square Giulio Andreotti had alerted the Holy See to the dangers of the pope’s “popularity”. 
Then there is the interpretation of the faithful who place an icon of the Madonna of Czestochowa on the chair ready for John Paul and kneel before the dais as if before an ‘instant’ altar. Right after this there is a clinical account of the event, made up of brief bulletins and a completely laical visit by Sandro Pertini, who visits the Gemelli Hospital as if visiting a wounded companion that doctors have saved in extremis. Then there is the memory of the bystanders and, especially of secretary Mons. Stanislao Dziwisz, who remembers the sudden flight of the doves and  Wojty?a’s body collapsing limply.
Last, but not least, there is Wojtyla’s interpretation of the event, tinged with his providential vision of history and his Marian piety. In the coincidence of the 13th May he sees a reference to the visions of Fatima (a place name linked to the story of the life of the Prophet Mohammed). Above all, he is certain that the trajectory of the bullet, which so nearly caused fatal injury, was miraculously altered and for this he gives thanks to the Virgin Mary, setting the bullet in the crown of the statue in the Portuguese sanctuary, and finally explaining that his assassination attempt was the ‘third secret’ that the little prophets had foreseen in 1917 and which was archived by the Church in Rome.