Four large-scale poster works advertise a circus titled Un Mondo Che Muore. Produced as hand screen prints for Knust Kunz Gallery Editions, they are presented for the first time within a site-specific installation.

The motifs were originally developed in 2022 for a project at MACRO in Rome marking the 100th anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Olaf Nicolai responded to a 1967 television interview between Pasolini and the poet Ezra Pound, an encounter shaped by profound ideological opposition. He translates the ambivalent tone of the conversation, poised between intellectual exchange and performative spectacle, into a typographic staging accompanied by a short text about two clowns. A miniature circus arena extends this idea spatially, allowing the dialogue of the two figures to unfold as a theatrical situation.

Additional rooms present archival material that underscores the role of aesthetic articulation in staging and communicating ideology, including documentation of the carefully scripted television interview and photographs taken during the filming of Pasolini’s final work Salò.

We developed the four posters through extensive research and iterative testing, refining the typographic compositions and calibrating them for large-format screen printing. The final works translate Nicolai’s conceptual approach into a precise yet theatrical visual language. They function not as announcements but as autonomous graphic works that hold tension between clarity and spectacle.