Paris

Maurice Pefura, The Silent Way (2013)

April 21, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“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)

Inferno, Romeo Castellucci (2008)

November 21, 2021 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

[. . .] “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.

“Dante Today” in France’s Le Monde

October 31, 2021 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“Il existe un lien insolite entre le nom du groupe de musique électronique Nine Circles, le film Behemoth, du réalisateur chinois Zhao Liang (2015), et l’univers terrifiant du jeu vidéo Resident Evil : Revelations. Une convergence souterraine, qui remonte à un poème du XIV^e siècle : La Divine Comédie, à laquelle Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) a consacré les deux dernières décennies de sa vie. Tous trois puisent leurs références dans cette œuvre qui expose, en trois cantiques que sont Enfer, Purgatoire et Paradis, une traversée de l’au-delà dont la colossale influence est documentée par l’étonnant projet Dante Today.

“Depuis 2006, ce site tenu par des spécialistes américains archive toutes les références à Dante dans la culture populaire contemporaine. Ghana, Chili, Irak, Vietnam, Islande : les mentions, qui se comptent en milliers, dessinent une cartographie planétaire de l’aura du poète florentin. Comme si, sept siècles après sa mort, le 14 septembre 1321, toute représentation de l’au-delà demeurait inévitablement aimantée par la puissance d’évocation de ses 14 233 hendécasyllabes. [. . .] –Youness Bousenna, Le Monde, October 3, 2021

Bianca Garavelli, Le Terzine Perdute di Dante (2015)

March 11, 2020 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

Bianca Garavelli’s Le terzine perdute di Dante is a historical thriller that follows the affairs of the poet himself, in exile in Paris, and a contemporary scholar who appears to have discovered the poet’s autograph in a manuscript in Milan. The novel was published by BUR Rizzoli in 2015.

“Parigi, 1309. Dante, in esilio, stanco e spaventato, vive nel terrore di essere perseguitato dai suoi numerosi nemici. Una delle sue poche consolazioni è la compagnia di una donna misteriosa, Marguerite Porete, una mistica accusata di eresia della quale Dante diventa il miglior allievo, e che lo conduce nel centro di una guerra spietata fra due ordini che agiscono nell’ombra. In gioco c’è un pericoloso segreto, una profezia di cui l’Alighieri è il depositario prescelto. Ed è il filologo medievale Riccardo Donati a mettersi sulle tracce di quel mistero centinaia di anni dopo, nella Milano dei giorni nostri: mentre esamina un antico manoscritto si imbatte in quella che ha tutta l’aria di essere la firma autografa di Dante. Sarà l’inizio di una vorticosa e inattesa avventura che stravolgerà per sempre la vita di Riccardo, e non solo. Un romanzo sospeso tra passato e presente, tra storia, letteratura e azione, per un thriller storico che si trasforma in una caccia all’uomo frenetica e appassionante.” —BUR

See more at Bianca Garavelli’s website here.

Dante in poster for HBO’s series, “Succession” (2019)

August 16, 2019 By Professor Arielle Saiber

Image on wall is a painting entitled “Dante and Virgil” (1850) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. It appears to be the falsifiers of Inf. 30, Capocchio and Gianni Schicchi, in combat.

Contributed by Kristina Olson

The original painting, currently held in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France, below.

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