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Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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Kader Attia, Dispossesion (2013)

April 29, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

kader-attia-projections-on-dark-wall-pope-next-to-artifact

“Soul—the term occurs often, meant in a rigorously philosophical sense as a ‘vital principle’ or ‘bodily entelechy.’ Just like all the medieval masters, Dante sees in man a being made up of both body and soul. As regards the relationship between the two components, Dante sticks to the Aristotolean solutions, adopted unanimously by the theologians of the day. Hence, the soul may be conceived and represented as separate from the body, in its definitive condition of a dweller in the kingdoms of the afterlife. In this sense, the term is used countless times to refer to the shadows of the dead in their concrete individuality: ‘O spirit courteous of Mantua’ (Inferno, Canto II, 58); ‘But all those souls who weary were and naked,/Their colour changed’ (Inferno, Canto III, 100).”

Retrieved from The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists by Simon Njami.

For more on the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, see Wikipedia.

Categories: Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 2013, Africa, Algeria, Art Books, Canto 3, France, Inferno, Visual Arts

Maurice Pefura, The Silent Way (2013)

April 21, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

birds-eye-view-of-installation-three-rings-of-white-sheets-positioned-like-dominoes

“The spectator is invited to enter, to move through this bright, white virginal structure and to slowly discover that on the surface of the sheets, printed in white on white, there are lines taken from the Cantos that make up Dante’s Paradiso. The ensemble of the elements is illuminated by a soft, pure light that serves as a guide: the transformation that the artist wishes to bring about does not focus on the path followed by Dante, but rather on the perennial and memorable presence of Beatrice, who according to the artist embodies the very sense of Dante’s Paradiso.  The installation thus becomes a path on which the onlooker is enshrouded in words and light. A place where—just like in the Comedy itself—it is still possible to enter and be illuminated by the candour and potency of the very essence of love.”

From The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists by Simon Njami.

See also the images in Griot magazine, which describes the piece as it was presented in Njami’s I is An Other / Be the Other exhibit at the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM) in Rome: “Maurice Prefura’s The Silent Way stages La Divina Commedia, a sort of labyrinth made of white floating empty pages that form its walls and hold visitors prisoners. Crossing this labyrinth, however, one realizes that there are visible inscriptions on the pages which can only be seen from certain angles, ‘as if in a rite of initiation.’ Once out of the labyrinth, one meets Beatrice.”   –Johanne Affricot, “Contemporary Art and Africa in Rome,” Griot (March 20, 2018)

Categories: Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 2013, Africa, Art, Beatrice, Circles, France, Guides, Installation Art, Journeys, Light, Love, Paradiso, Paris, Transformation

Journées Dante Alighieri in Montauban, France (2021)

March 27, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

dante_days_montauban_exposition

“La soirée inaugurale des Journées Dante Alighieri a rassemblé le monde de la culture, les élus et de nombreux italophones au théâtre Olympe-de-Gouges. Un vrai succès pour cette institution culturelle italienne, la plus ancienne et la plus prestigieuse dans le monde, implantée à Montauban depuis plus de cinquante ans. Pour son président Alain Crivella : ‘J’ai le grand honneur d’ouvrir ces journées avec vous, le rôle de Dante dans la création de l’Italie est prépondérant, son message 700 ans après sa mort incroyablement actuel et universel. Écrivain hors pair et théoricien politique, linguiste, il a fait face à la crise idéologique du Moyen Âge en défendant la spiritualité face aux valeurs marchandes.’

“Aujourd’hui à 18 h 30 au Théâtre Olympe de Gouges, deux artistes, Odile Cariteau et Cathy Teil, exposent entre peintures figuratives et abstraites, enluminures, écritures, collages, elles retranscrivent l’univers dantesque.” [. . .]    —Ladepeche.fr, February 2, 2021 (retrieved March 27, 2022)

Categories: Performing Arts, Places
Tagged with: 2021, 700th anniversary, Arts Festivals, Cultural Centers, Dante Days, France, Montauban, Music, Readings

La vita nuova EP, Christine and the Queens (2020)

January 8, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

la_vita_nuova_christine_and_the_queens_album_coverFrench singer-songwriter Héloïse Adélaïde Letissier (AKA Christine and the Queens) released their electropop EP La vita nuova on February 27, 2020. The album’s title makes explicit reference to Dante’s text La vita nuova. The album was accompanied by a short film featuring Christine and her relationship with a mysterious figure known as “The Faun”.

Watch the short film and listen to the EP here.

Read a review of the EP, posted on Pitchfork, here.

Categories: Music, Performing Arts
Tagged with: 2020, Albums, Electronic Music, Electropop, France, French Music, La vita nuova, Music, Short Films

Inferno, Romeo Castellucci (2008)

November 21, 2021 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

white-sea-of-cloth-descends-upon-the-audience-performance-experiment

[. . .] “Romeo Castellucci attempts to ‘hurl down The Divine Comedy on the earth of a stage’. He offers the spectator, in three stages and at three venues of the Festival, a crossing, the experience of a Divine Comedy.

“Inferno is a monument of pain. The artist must pay. In a dark wood in which he is immediately plunged, he doubts, he fears, he suffers. But what sin is the artist guilty of? If he is thus lost, it is because he does not know the answer to this question. Alone on the large stage, or on the contrary, walled in by the crowd and confronted with the world’s hubbub, the man that Romeo Castellucci puts on stage fully suffers, bewildered from this experience of loss of self. Everything here aggresses him, the violence of the images, the fall of his own body into matter, the animals and spectres. The visual dynamic of this show possesses the consistency of this stupor, sometimes this dread, that seizes the man when he is reduced to his paltriness, defenceless faced with the elements that overwhelm him. But this fragility is a resource, however, because it is the condition of a paradoxical gentleness. Romeo Castellucci shows each spectator that at the bottom of his own fears there is a secret space, marked by melancholy, in which he hangs on to life, to ‘the incredible nostalgia of his own life.'” [. . .]    —Festival D’Avignon, 2008

Watch segments of the show here.

Relatedly, see our post on Romeo Castellucci’s earlier 2002 commendation here.

This theatrical piece will be discussed by scholar Sara Fontana in her contribution to the forthcoming volume Dante Alive.

Categories: Performing Arts
Tagged with: 2008, Adaptations, Animals, Architecture, Costumes, Dark Wood, Dogs, Festivals, France, Journeys, Live Performances, Paris, Performance Art, Suffering, Theatre, Translations

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How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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