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Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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Pinacoteca Dantesca

March 2, 2021 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

pinacoteca-dantesca-2021“Nel gennaio del 1994 quando riceve dal Prof. Corrado Gizzi l’allora Direttore dell’istituto di Studi e Ricerche ‘Casa di Dante in Abruzzo’ l’invito a realizzare un’ opera con soggetto dantesco a scelta dell’artista da destinare alla Pinacoteca F. Bellonzi , Sughi sta ancora lavorando ad un gruppo di dipinti dal Titolo Andare dove? Il nucleo principale del ciclo risale agli anni 1991-1992, Sughi a proposito scrive :

“’Sono gli anni dell’implosione dell’Unione Sovietica , la fine per molti di una speranza di un’ideologia che aveva attraversato tutta la prima metà e una parte cospicua della seconda metà del 900. Tanti avevano creduto in questa ideologia , in questa prima grande rivoluzione socialista , ma sappiamo tutte le rivoluzioni hanno il destino di essere tradite e alla fine gettano nello smarrimento , nella paura, nella lontananza da se stessi tutti gli uomini che ci avevano creduto. … Da questo presupposto è nato il ciclo Andare dove ? … poi si è dilatato e non riguardava più l’implosione, la caduta del Comunismo come nei primi dipinti ( L’uomo con le valigie, Addio alla casa rossa)ma il destino dell’uomo, e sono venuti questi quadri verdi con degli uomini nel paesaggio o che guardano da una terrazza o che sembrano persi nel contemplare, tutti intitolati Andare dove? Quasi che l’uomo si trovi in una situazione critica, di passaggio e cerchi la sua identità all’interno di un labirinto che in questi quadri è rappresentato dalla natura.’
in A.C. Quintavalle, Sughi, Catalogo della mostra al Complesso del Vittoriano, Roma, Skira editore, Milano 2007, pag. 190.

“Al centro della tela in piedi la figura di Dante ferma, quasi restia alla mano tesa, appena accennata di Virgilio , che gli si offre d’innanzi, a ragione della forte dominante nel canto I dell’Inferno del tema dello smarrimento, del dubbio e della paura si inserisce perfettamente,senza forzatura alcuna , nella discorso pittorico che Sughi allora stava svolgendo.” [. . .]    –Alberto Sughi, Arte32.

Categories: Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 2021, Art, Artists, Circles of Hell, Dante, Exhibitions, Virgil

Kat Mustatea, Voidopolis (2020)

January 31, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

@kmustatea on Instagram (January 30, 2021)

“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

Categories: Digital Media, Performing Arts, Visual Art & Architecture, Written Word
Tagged with: 2020, Austria, Charon, Cities, Coronavirus, Covid-19, Digital Art, Inferno, Instagram, Linz, Literature, Minos, New York City, Performance Art, Poetry, Social Media, Technology, Virgil

“How Dante and Virgil Can Guide Recovery From Mental Illness”

December 3, 2020 By Jasmine George, FSU '24

“In the epic poem ‘The Inferno,’ written by Dante Aligheri in the 14th century, the author journeys through ‘hell’ and is escorted by the great poet Virgil. Virgil is from the otherworld and can walk with Dante as a fellow traveller and let him experience the catastrophic existential restructuring to foundationally change a life, and, eventually, show him a way back to the world. This relationship model is not a treatment program or an informed guess but rather guidance based on a shared suffering.

“What is different in a Dante/Virgil relationship is that the roles are interchangeable. On some journeys of the self, you may be Dante or you may be Virgil, depending on your experience and the issue. Your suffering has utility.”   –Eric Arauz, Psychiatry and Behavioral Health Learning Network, 2014

Read the full article here.

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2014, Mental Health, Mental Illness, Psychiatry, Psychology, Virgil

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947)

November 24, 2020 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

the-malcolm-lowry-project-under-the-volcano-1947Chapter 3. 65.6: “In Canto XIII of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil enter a pathless wood full of withered trees. Hearing a mournful wailing but seeing no one, the poet stops and is advised by Virgil to break off a twig from one of the trees. Dante does so; the tree becomes dark with blood and begins to cry: ‘Perché mi scerpi? / non hai tu spirto di pietade alcuno?’ (‘Why do you tear me? / Have you no spirit of pity?’). The trees are the suicides, those who have wantonly destroyed their lives and poisoned their souls and are therefore fixed for eternity in barren sterility. [. . .]”

Chapter 3. 65.7: “In Mexico, figures of Christ or the Virgin Mary are common features of house or garden walls as reminders of the suffering Christ assumed on behalf of all. The words also evoke the suffering figure of Faustus: the earlier ‘Regard’ recalls his hellish fall, but the emphasis here, as with the echoes of Eliot and Dante above, is on blood and sorrow and compassion. Faustus, in distress and anguish, cannot look up to heaven for the mercy that is there; one drop of Christ’s blood would save his soul, but he cannot avoid despair. Like Faustus, the Consul is unable to ask for relief, even though it is so immediately at hand. In an early draft [UBC 29-8, 1] Lowry was more explicit: ‘You have always secretly longed, like Christ, even like your own brother, to die.'” [. . .]    — The Malcolm Lowry Project: Under The Volcano, June 2012.

See these and many more Dante-related annotations to Under the Volcano at the hypertext resource the Malcolm Lowry Project, sponsored by University of Otago (NZ).

 

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 1947, Commentary, England, Fiction, Literary Criticism, New Zealand, Novels, Virgil

Marica Mentier, “The History of Happiness,” The Science of Emotions

November 19, 2020 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“[Marica] Mentier recounts how she encountered Dante’s Commedia in college and cites the famous valedictory by Virgil in Purg. 27: ‘Take henceforth your pleasure as your guide.’ She continues, ‘Over the course of his journey, he has acquired the wisdom to know where true happiness lies, and now his heart will unerringly guide him there.’ (p.17)” –Contributor Alan R. Perry

Contributed by Alan R. Perry (Gettysburg College)

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2017, Emotions, Happiness, Magazines, Pleasure, Virgil

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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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