“Austrian gothic metal band Dreams of Sanity’s album Komödia is partially based on The Divine Comedy.” —Wikipedia
Kat Mustatea, Voidopolis (2020)
“Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory that is currently unfolding over 45 posts on my Instagram feed (@kmustatea). Started July 1, 2020, it is a loose retelling of Dante’s Inferno, informed by the grim experience of wandering through NYC during a pandemic. Instead of the poet Virgil, my guide is a caustic hobo named Nikita.” –Kat Mustatea
Featuring a Dantesque cast of characters ranging from the Virgilian Nikita to a mohawked Minos, a gruff ferryman named Kim and a withdrawn George Perec, Mustatea’s Voidopolis weaves through the pandemic-deserted streets of Manhattan, a posthuman landscape of absence and loss, bearing witness to its vanishings. Voidopolis won the 2020 Arts & Letters “Unclassifiable” Prize for Literature, and received a Literature grant from the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation.
To read more about both the process of the piece and its influences, including Dante, see the interview with Mustatea featured in Dovetail Magazine (2020).
Mustatea’s project at Ars Electronica 2021
The project’s website
Lana Grossa “Paradiso” Ribbon
Available at the Lana Grossa online store here.
Dante’s Vision Exhibition, Vienna
Valery Kharitonov, “Worthless. The Vestibule of Hell.”, 1987
“On June 7, 2011, Dom- und Diözesanmuseum, Vienna, opened the DANTES VISION Exhibition based on the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). The Exhibition presents paintings of artists of the 20th – 21st centuries: German artist and graphic artist Theodor Zeller(1900–1986), Russian painter Valery Kharitonov (*1939), American sculptor and designer Roger Roberts (*1952), Austrian artist and graphic artist Robert Hammerstiel (*1933), South Tyrolean artist Markus Vallazza (*1936), etc.” —Allrus Gallery
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
