Beyond the Jordan, 2016

During the research for suitable filming locations for his production of Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1961), director Pier Paolo Pasolini traveled extensively through Israel and Palestine. To his disappointment, the places visited in the Holy Land could not live up to his conceptions of the sites from the Gospels, and all production were finally made on various locations throughout Italy.

In a similar tradition to the Grand Tour, media-tourist and pilgrim, Daniel Hoflund revisits a specific film location, by following the footsteps of Pasolinis adaptation of The Gospel according St. Matthew. The return to film- and TV-locations within media-tourism – a reoccurring theme in Hoflunds work – shares many similarities with pilgrim journeys to religious sites, where the physical and historical location is in relation to the imaginary.

With the work Beyond the Jordan, Hoflund returns to the setting of Jesus baptism in the River Jordan, as Pasolini decided to depict it. The scene with Jesus and Saint John the Baptist by the bank of Jordan is one of the most famous motifs in Western art history, and the endless paintings and illustrations of this event has mainly taken place in Italian, Dutch, French and German landscapes. Hoflunds work further elaborates this idealized landscape tradition by returning to one of the sites that has come to shape our modern (cinematic) conception of our world and history.

The work consists of a series of silent video loops depicting the continuous stream of the river Jordan. These black and white film sequences, with its details, slightly abstracted and contemplative visuals gives the impression of being something left behind, taken out or found in the background of Pasolinis actual film-production. All characters are missing in the picture and what remains is the specific space for us to project our mental images onto.

In relation to the film loops of the movie-location, the work Beyond the Jordan consist of various framed photographs and objects connected with Pasolinis adaptation as well as the archeological site ”beyond the Jordan”. In 2015, UNESCO officially placed the Baptism Site “Bethany Beyond the Jordan” (Al-Maghtas) on the World Heritage List. The travelers postcard, the photographic document and the archeological archive of the pilgrim site correspond with the fantastic, hallucinatory and romanticized conception of the site that has been reconstructed and distributed through the history of arts and culture.