Events

MY PURGATORY was born after a series of virtual meetings that the curators Elena Giulia Abbiatici and Valentina Gioia Levy moderated in 2021 as a part of the "Dante's gaze" a project conceived and directed by Peter Lang, for the Central Institute for Catalog and Documentation (ICCD). Selected, as an official event, by the DANTE 2021 National Committee, established by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage for the celebration of the great Italian poet, 700 years after his death, Lo Sguardo di Dante aims to reinterpret some of the profound transformations that the world undergoes in the present era, through the “Dante's” methods of observation and transposition of the real into the fantastic. Lang, creator of the project, says: “The question posed here is not only what the Poet observed, but how the Poet continues to accompany us, how he guides us in his imagination and how we manage to include him in ours”.

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Abbiatici & Levy, entrusted by Lang with the curation of the section about the Purgatory, decided to interpret the concept of "atonement" from the point of view of the relationship between men and the environment, focusing on the concept of the cause and effect’s law. Atmospheric, physical and astronomical phenomena, the relationship between man and nature are the leitmotifs of Dante's canticles. Confronting the section of Purgatory, the curators therefore replaced the religious notion of sin, with the secular concept of anthropic impact and that of divine punishment or expiation with that of natural catastrophe. Therefore, in the era of the anthropocene, humanist for different reasons than in the Dante era, man suffers calamities and environmental disasters as a consequence of their craving, pride, greed, lust ... Dante's gaze, transversal and omnipresent in western culture, allows the re-reading of some works by contemporary artists that seem to be linked to the Purgatory of the Comedy.