As a political artist, director, theoretician and writer, Pier Paolo Pasolini engaged with non-European cultures and the ways they have been shaped by the forces of Western late capitalism and modern globalization on a variety of levels. In the confrontation with the foreign, his work after 1968 opens up the discursive space of modernity and puts trust in novel constellations of novel allegories. That Pasolini had worked since the early 1970s on an allegorization of the profane in a foreign context had two consequences for both the concept of allegory and Pasolini’s idea of profanation: for one, that as a critical form of confron- tation, the allegory draws on an alternative store of text and image; and for another, that in the foreign context, the profane as such may only possibly be conceived as allegory. This trans- mission becomes evident in a shorter film that has received little attention till now: Le mura di Sana’a.

Toni Hildebrandt holds a PhD (summa cum laude) in Art History from the University of Basel. From 2010 to 2013 he was a Re- search Fellow at “eikones”, the NCCR Iconic Criticism at the University of Basel and a Member of “What Images Do”, an International Research Network established in collaboration with TU Delft, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research, Humanities (FKK). He has been a lecturer at the eikones Summer Schools 2011 (»Image Practices«) and 2012 (»The Construction of Images«). In 2013/14 he was appointed as a one-year Resident Fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome. Currently he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Bern. In Summer 2015 he will be a Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Law as Culture”, the Center for Advanced Study at Uni- versity of Bonn, where he will continue to work on a book project on the late Pier Paolo Pasolini.