2021 Archives - Dante Today

GAU Dante, 2021

May 12, 2022 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“GAU-Gallerie d’arte Urbana è un progetto che ha come obiettivo quello di importare un modello di risanamento urbano che riesca, a ispirare bellezza e funzionalità, attraverso la street art, applicata ad un oggetto di uso quotidiano come le campane della raccolta differenziata del vetro. Il progetto ha come obiettivo principale quello di creare un galleria d’arte urbana gratuita, fruibile in ogni momento dal cittadino, per ribadire il concetto dell’arte come bene comune, incentivando l’attenzione sulle tematiche di differenziazione dei rifiuti.

“Per la sua quinta edizione, GAU sceglie di omaggiare Dante Alighieri nel settimo centenario della sua morte. Gli artisti lavoreranno sui 34 canti dell’Inferno, attualizzandoli attraverso la peculiarità del proprio linguaggio artistico, reinterpretando simboli, luoghi e personaggi della Divina Commedia in chiave contemporanea.

“Moby Dick – Giusy Guerriero – Dez – Marta Quercioli – Zara Kiafar – Tito – Violetta Carpino – Kiddo – DesX – Yest – Er Pinto – Olives – Lola Poleggi – Kenji – BloodPurple – Orgh – Lady Nina – Teddy Killer – Valerio Paolucci – Wuarky – Karma Factory – Muges147 – Maudit – Hoek – Alessandra Carloni – Cipstrega – Molecole – Korvo – Alekos Reize – Gojo.” —Gallerie d’Arte Urbana

See a gallery of all 34 decorated recycling bins, one for each canto of the Inferno, on the GAU website. You can also download the magazine on the site, which includes a map where visitors to Rome can locate each bin.

The image above features Korvo’s design for cantos 30-31. Photo credit Valentino Bonacquisti.

“Revisiting Dante’s Florence: Experiencing Dante’s ‘circles of hell'” Essay, Sarah Odishoo (2021)

April 12, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

“Dante’s Florence was a circle of intrigue between the Holy Roman Catholic Church and Firenze’s powerful political parties. Dante, as a young Italian, became part of the struggle to keep the city for the people. He lost. He was exiled. He wrote The Divine Comedy, starting with The Inferno. Mirroring through reflection.

“I begin to understand the infernal map Dante had drawn. Florence itself is the paradigm for the nine circles of the inferno. The city is ringed around by streets that all move toward its center. In the time of Dante, the city had been a series of expanding fortresses, enlarging as the population and wealth increased. But the structure — the ringed city — with its quarters defined and stationary, is still in place. And the Arno River is one of its boundaries. Dante used Florence to define the parameters and structure of Hell — a spiraling atlas of infernal distances.

“Dante’s cosmos is just that: What one does is immediately mirrored in life and in death. As are Beatrice’s thoughts and actions; her awareness brought her closer to that state of unconditional awareness, one that sees more of the whole, the holy. The creatures in the inferno fell in love with the lesser good — money, food, fame, a lover —and staying loyal to that lesser love brings the limitations, the fragmentation of the whole. The lesser holds the whole, but the lesser is unable in its separateness from the whole to maintain the weight of all that is.” [. . .] –Sarah Odishoo, The Smart Set, August 22, 2021 (retrieved April 12, 2022)

Read Odishoo’s full essay about her journey to and within Florence here.

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle Exhibit at the CityLife Park in Milan

April 12, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

“In collaborazione con Kooness.com e Arte Generali, ‘L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle’ è la grande mostra pubblica disseminata nel Parco di CityLife. Organizzata nell’ambito delle celebrazioni dantesche, gli artisti presenti si sono confrontati con i temi di esilito, invenzione e linguaggio.

“A fare da cappello introduttivo alla mostra un elemento surreale: una pensilina (opera di Michela Lucenti, Fermata Tre Colori) installata all’interno del parco, sul bordo di un sentiero interno, che segna la linea 33 in “Piazza Tre Colori”: in realtà nessun autobus passerà mai da quella fermata, che assolve invece alla funzione di mappa in cui trovare i riferimenti alle opere disseminate nel verde di CityLife. Si tratta di lavori accomunati dalle stesse tematiche ma sviluppati attraverso l’impiego dei più disparati materiali, tecniche e esiti creativi: dall’opera sonora di Roberto Cacciapaglia, Cammino stellare, a quella interattiva di Matteo Vettorello, Sintonizzatore di decongestione ambientale, dalla fotografia Beatrice e il Poeta di Giovanni Gastel al noto Terzo Paradiso di Michelangelo Pistoletto. Il riflesso aureo è al centro delle opere di Alice Ronchi, con SOLE/SUN e quella di Marco Nereo Rotelli, Il Sole e le altre “Stelle”; lo sguardo è il filo conduttore dell’opera di Alice Padovani (Lo sguardo sospeso/The suspense gaze) mentre la trascendenza lo è in Drop the body, di Patrick Tuttofuoco. Infine, il Paradiso dantesco è evocato da Silt Prophecy di Lucia Cristiani, che rappresenta un fondale argenteo in cui scorre un flusso d’acqua (realizzato in stagno), e Paradisi di Velasco Vitali, trentatré uccelli in bronzo patinato i quali posano sui rami di trentatré alberi piantati nel prato di CityLife.”[. . .] –Giulia Ronchi, Artribune, March 29, 2021 (retrieved April 12, 2022)

“The Fractal Consciousness of Dante’s Divine Comedy”, Essay by Mark Vernon (2021)

April 11, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

“Dante Alighieri was early in recognizing that our age has a problem. He was the first writer to use the word moderno, in Italian, and the difficulty he spotted with the modern mind is its limited capacity to relate to the whole of reality, particularly the spiritual aspects. This might sound surprising, given that his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, is often described as one of the most brilliant creations of the medieval imagination. It is taken to be a genius expression of a discarded worldview, not the modern one, from an era in which everything was taken to be connected to the supreme reality called God. But Dante was born in a time of troubling transition. He realized that this cosmic vision was being challenged, and he didn’t seek to reject it or restore it, but to remake it.

“This brings us to the heart of why Dante still matters today. He stresses ways of knowing about life based on experiencing and undergoing, as opposed to studying or inspecting. They bring an understanding that isn’t about accumulating information and sorting data but trusting feeling and following insights.

“The vision is tremendous and simple and is a gloriously articulated reflection on everyday human consciousness. We are aware and can be aware of being aware. And this is Dante’s message for now: in a way, all we have to do to rediscover the essence of our intelligence, and the capacity to relate to the whole of reality – particularly in its spiritual aspects – is turn towards our felt experience, and examine what we find. There is presence and freedom, intention and imagination, truth in stories and transformations of time. To grow in this sense is to get better at being alive.”[. . .] –Mark Vernon, Aeon, July 20, 2021 (retrieved April 11, 2022)

Read the full text of psychotherapist and writer Mark Vernon’s essay here.

See our other post relating to Mark Vernon and his work here.

“Gaming the Divine Comedy: A History”, Talk by Andrea Angiolino (2021)

April 11, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

On June 9, 2021, the University of Edinburgh’s History and Games Lab YouTube channel posted a video entitled “Gaming the Divine Comedy: A History”. The talk, given by game designer Andrea Angiolino, “explores how the Divine Comedy has been gamified and will compare it to other literary works.”

Watch the full, recorded lecture here.

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