In the early 1960s, Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini arrived in Palestine to search for locations for his biblical drama The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). To his disappointment, his biblical imaginary of Palestine and its landscape did not match the country’s reality – a place ‘contaminated by modernity’. His film was instead shot in southern Italy while his ‘location hunting’ in Palestine was captured in a documentary film titled Sopralluoghi in Palestina (1963). Narrated in his own voice, Sopralluoghi in Palestina walks us through the contemporary Palestinian landscape in what was an unsuccessful search for a filmset to capture the story of Christ.

Pasolini’s Travelogue is both a critique of and a commentary on Pasolini’s Sopralluoghi in Palestina. It situates his film – and its absence – within a longer tradition of the biblical lens that has occupied European colonial imaginations of Palestine’s material landscape since at least the nineteenth century. Through this lens, Palestine’s landscape and native Palestinian population were frequently depicted as at odds with modernization viewed as solely the result of Western actors and interventions.

Pasolini’s Travelogue simultaneously historicises and contests this view, offering a counter-narrative to the various misleading representations of Palestine’s landscape. As a research-based intervention, it traces the evolution of biblical representations of Palestine and its native population from the nineteenth century travelogue to Pasolini’s unrealised film. It also employs a range of experimental mediums – including still and moving images – to reveal the dissonance between Palestine’s biblical representations and tangible material transformations in the modern era.