Reunion

Voice-over: “Only finding one of the originals – whose name was Antinisca Nemour – meant that most of the missing boys and girls were replaced with doubles. After the reunion she told us that she’d avoided being killed in the film by asking to be excluded from taking part in the final scene.”

“…I made a piece in 1998 called ‘Reunion:Salo ‘ where I searched for the 16 murdered adolescents from Pier Polo Pasolini’s 1975 film ‘Salo or 120 days of Sodom’. I was going to stage a reunion party for them and expected to find maybe a third of the original actors. I had a structure planned; it was going to be quite elegant…Anyway , after three months I had only found one of them. I was becoming worried. To cut a very long story short I decided to stage the reunion with her as guest of honour and all the others replaced with doubles. Afterwards, when she was leaving I was thanking her for participating and was trying to think of questions to ask her about her involvement in the original film. I asked her finally how she was ‘murdered’. She replied that actually she had asked Pasolini if she could avoid this act and he had respected her wishes. This was amazing. The one person who had reappeared in the present had eluded her fictional death. I had to change the piece completely having heard this response. It was both the worst and best possible answer to my search.”

— Adam Chodzko