Inferno Archives - Page 2 of 136

Kader Attia, Dispossesion (2013)

April 29, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“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.

Aïda Muluneh, The 99 Series (2014)

April 22, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“…I painted her body white because for me, living in this city we call Addis Ababa, we don’t need to fantasize about going to the Inferno—I have seen and experienced enough things to really make me question humanity. I have realized that in order to get ahead here, many people wear masks in order to protect their future. But while doing this, the reality is that I have seen the various atrocities and the great lengths that many will go to in order to maintain their success. So with that in mind, for me the red hands symbolize the guilt associated with the thirst for upward mobility. The cloth wrapped around Salem’s body is specifically from the southern region of Ethiopia, which has endured several centuries of oppression, slavery, and so forth. For the background color, I chose the off-grey because it reminds me of dirty snow; this reminds me of my childhood growing up in Canada, in the midst of the bitter cold, and also the challenges that I faced being an African immigrant in an all-white community.”

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

For more information on The 99 Series, visit Muluneh’s website here.

Berenice Josephine Bickle, film stills (2013)

April 22, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“For the artist, the Divine Comedy represents a ‘theological’ allegory, where the literal level becomes a ‘beautiful lie’ conceived in order to convey a hidden truth. The historical characters that appear in Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso are realistically determined and they provide a figural interpretation of history. From this starting point, the artist feels justified in introducing the viewer to her own reading of the Divine Comedy, in which she investigates histories mirroring Dante’s Inferno from the perspective of contemporary Africa. The work is composed of two opposite video screens, splitting the audience’s point of view between them, as the perception of two narratives occurs simultaneously. The central focus is a looped conversation between Beatrice and Virgil, where the feminine and masculine voices are superimposed by Dante’s presence, a poetical presence that weaves the two narratives together. While Beatrice’s character is dressed in Maputo clothes, surrounded by curious artifacts that together combine to make a coloured plot based on the dynamics of presence/absence and life/death, Virgil becomes a guide to one of the cities of Zimbabwe. No longer a storyteller of the epic on Trojan Wars, the Virgil constructed by the artist narrates the wars of colonial and postcolonial Africa, where the archival footage of Zimbabwe’s liberation war becomes the base for the narrative.”

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

For more on the Zimbabwean artist Berry Bickle, see Wikipedia.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human (1948)

April 16, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“…The front door of another person’s house terrified me more than the gate of Inferno in the Divine Comedy, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I really felt I could detect within the door the presence of a horrible dragon-like monster writhing there with a dank, raw, smell…” –Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, 1948

Contributed by Camila Aguilar (University of Texas at Austin, ’25)

“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.

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