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Perpetual Limbo
Dante's Inferno by Valentina Vannicola |
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| 07/12/2011 |
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by Benedetta Cestelli Guidi, from the catalogue of the 21st Courmayeur Noir in Festival
The photograph used for the 2011 Courmayeur Noir in Festival was taken by Valentina Vannicola in the Manziana Caldara, the marshy basin with ethereal vegetation in Lazio's Maremma. Here the artist set the red-haired girl beneath a glass reliquary, suspended in timelessness like her kindred spirits who inhabit the first circle of Limbo. Here the Etruscans placed the doors of their pagan Hades, and with reason: a backdrop of trees corrals a muddy space in which vegetation of a predominantly sickly red color struggles to grow. Here Dante emphasized the acoustic dimension, how the air oozes with the sighs of those for whom nothing will change at the moment of Universal Judgment: there is no possible redemption for the damned gathered here, prisoners of a sin they did not choose but were subjected to. Is there a more unjust punishment than this?
These damned are immersed in a perpetual noir, guilty only of not having been able to choose and condemned by a blind and unrelenting divine judgment: a never-ending nightmare. The photograph is part of a series on Dante's Inferno made by Vannicola in 2011: 15 large-format (90x60) photos in which the sorrows of the world of darkness are depicted subjectively, thereby eliminating the bothersome figure of Dante who is ever-present in the established iconography of the poem. By eliminating Dante, the artist does away with intermediaries, placing herself and us in the narrative and sharing the poem's point of view: a sequence of “live” shots that immerse us in this nightmarish world. The apocalyptic sense, however, is not abstract. Rather, it comes from the placement of its tableaux vivants – created with actors and materials gathered from the surroundings – in an “earthly world,” a space recognizable precisely in virtue of its landscapes: the Manziana Caldara, the coast of Santa Severa, the pits of the hinterlands of Tolfa…. The realistic settings of Inferno are what evoke chills: we share with the pagans and unbaptized - the damned of Limbo - the suspension of a horizon of imagination in a landscape that we know and recognize as one of the many extraordinary distinctive features of our country.
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www.aracne-rivista.it
Valentina Vannicola (Roma, 1982) graduated in Film Studies from the La Sapienza University of Rome and later from the Scuola Romana di Fotografia. Her first exhibit, entitled Su(l) reale, curated by Nathalie Santini (7min photography), ran from December 2009 to February 2010 at Rome's s.t. foto libreria galleria. In October 2010 she won second prize for Best Photo Portfolio at Fotoleggendo. In April of this year she had a solo show, curated by Anna Cestelli Guidi, on the occasion of Libri come. Festa del Libro e della Lettura, at Rome's Auditorium Parco della Musica. In September 2011 her photos were curated by Benedetta Cestelli Guidi as part of the Fotografia International Festival in Rome. That same month, she published the volume L’inferno di Dante, edited by Benedetta Cestelli Guidi. In October, 2011 she had an exhibit at the Wunderkammern Gallery. She is a member of the OnOff Picture agency and is currently working with the Wunderkammern Gallery.
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