Selva
The installation is the result of an architectural research around the museum experience: it stems from the desire to establish a dialectical comparison between the path described by the poet Dante Alighieri and its ability to be reproduced in a real scenario, and therefore understood and experienced entirely from a single person.
Inside the garden named after Rinaldo da Concorezzo, a dialogue between subject and object is staged in which the viewer is immersed in a path to be faced alone, characterized by a strong architectural component: in doing so, the Column, a fundamental and belonging element to the world of Architecture, it metaphorically replaces the trunk of a tree. This architectural-natural analogy has been theorized several times in the history of architecture: just think of the French historian Marc Antonie Laugier when, in the 18th century, he compared the classical column to the tree that supported the Primitive Hut, the natural matrix of architectural language.
Likewise, the architects Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni, during the design of the Danteum, a museum celebrating the figure of Dante, adopt this same expedient: in designing the space that should have simulated Dante's loss inside the Selva, they prepared 100 massive and granite columns that should have intimidated and made the crossing inaccessible to the visitor. The Danteum will never be built, but what remains of the project is the multidisciplinary approach in which the architects have distorted the classic meaning of the space-museum, elevating the viewer to an active element within the museum. Similarly, the architectural intent on which the installation inside the garden is based also comes from experiences of the situationist avant-garde theater, in which the thin line that separates stage and audience is eliminated, and the spectator becomes the protagonist.
At the entrance of the garden from the former “Piazza Dante”, today Piazza San Francesco, or from the side of the “Quadrarco di Braccioforte” , the visitor, as in the Divine Comedy, finds himself in a forest of columns. These act as a metaphorical expedient in replicating the dense forest, and are arranged within the garden according to a concentricity that has its center in the Poet's tomb. Concentricity is a recurring organizing element in the Opera: the circles of Hell, the terraces of Purgatory, and the spheres of Paradise are all concentric.
The sense of bewilderment that Dante feels inside the Selva Oscura, in addition to being given by the number and the density of these, it is here expressed by the covering of the columns which is in a mirror film, which through a game of reflections of the surrounding environment, disorients and deceives the visitor, but who, intrigued by the artifice and guided by a sinful-like curiosity, is tempted to go further and further, until he falls into it.
In fact, the mirror is a material often associated with the devil, given the deceptive nature of it.
Thinking of sin and loss of self, as for the darkness of the forest, it is difficult not to think of Twin Peaks and in particular of the perdition of agent Dale Cooper first in the Forest and then in the Black Lodge. In the final episode of the second season, Perdition and Fear, Disquiet and Darkness take on a three-dimensional and labyrinthine space, where only a semblance of mobility hides an inexorable impossibility of escape. A curtain, some comfortable furniture, and a demonic speech: nothing else, yet the effect is unforgettable.
“Io non so ben ridir com’io v’entrai”
D. Alighieri, Commedia. Inferno, Canto 1,v.10
In Philosophy, the act with which the conscience exhibits a feeling, a state of mind, or a product of the imagination by translating actions into images, is defined as Representation.
In Dante's first canto, consisting of forty-five triplets, Dante is lost, and lodges for a night in the Selva Oscura, without even a name. This long, we imagine, interminable Night, is not told in the Opera, so it remains for the reader to imagine it. This Night has been represented through thirty-four variations, in which different shades of color of the same scenario follow one another: from sunset to dawn, from despair to joy, from loss to self-discovery.
