a/political presents The Visitor, a new body of work by film director, photographer, performer, writer and queer provocateur Bruce LaBruce, inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s classic film Teorema (1968). For this re-imagining, the protagonist is a refugee, liberating the bourgeoisie from their sexual repression. The presentation at a/political included extended sex scenes from the new film The Visitor, political slogans and explicit photographs from the production.

The Visitor opened in the wake of Suella Braverman’s speech on Tues 26 September, 2023 to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. declaring immigration a threat to the West and hitting out at the ‘misguided dogma of multiculturalism’. Calling the 1951 Refugee Convention outdated, she discriminated unambiguously against women and gay people who qualify for refugee status due to extreme persecution.

In Pasolini’s original, Terence Stamp plays a mysterious character only identified in the credits as “The Visitor.” The origin of this character is never explained, as he infiltrates an upper-class Milanese family, gains their trust and seduces them one by one. The frustrated Mother, the alienated Father, the delicate Son, the innocent Daughter, and the devoutly religious Maid, all illustrate Freud’s concept of Family Romance – a neurotic symptom he observed in children, which would lead to sexual tensions within the family unit. Bruce LaBruce’s The Visitor, pushes the Family Romance to the extreme, as the individual characters are seduced in a series of sex scenes, sometimes including more than one family member. After the seductions come the confessions, each expressing how the Visitor’s erotic and Oedipal interventions have changed them before undergoing intense and explicit forms of transformation, which illustrate their sexual and spiritual liberation. -A/POLITICAL