An Interactive Reimagination of Dante’s ‘Noble Castle’ by Edoardo Tresoldi

Edoardo Tresoldi’s installation at MAR’s Dante exhibition in Ravenna enables visitors to physically enter the work and retrace the Italian philosopher-poet’s journey

The Art Museum of the City of Ravenna in Italy, or MAR as it’s called, has a cloister that originally belonged to a monastery that celebrated the Greek Madonna mentioned by Dante in Paradiso. Seven centuries after the famous Italian poet and philosopher wrote that final canticle of his famous Divine Comedy during his time in Ravenna, an art installation in that same cloister will now allow visitors to physically enter the work and retrace Dante’s journey, as if in a performance.

The work of Italian sculptor Edoardo Tresoldi, the installation called ‘Sacral’ will be on display at MAR as part of the third exhibition in its ‘Dante. The Eyes and the Mind’ series. Named as one of the most influential European artists under 30 by Forbes in 2017, Tresoldi is most widely known for his works ‘Absent Matter’ and cathedrals in wire mesh. He has also set up an installation called ‘Opera’ on the seafront at Reggio Calabria, and done a reconstruction of the early-Christian Basilica of Siponto that won the gold medal for Italian Architecture. Beside his work in Italy, Tresoldi has also made a large installation titled ‘Etherea’ in the US for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

The young sculptor was chosen by Giorgia Salerno, curator of the contemporary art section of the exhibition at MAR, to represent the theme of ‘Souls’. The idea was to create an ideal reinterpretation of Dante’s Castle of the Great Souls, which the poet calls Noble Castle in Canto IV of the Inferno. It’s a symbolic place inhabited by the souls of those who left honour and fame behind them on earth, who lived great earthly lives because of their moral qualities but who were destined for eternal suffering as they lacked theological virtues. In keeping with this idea, the major installation by Tresoldi, originally created in 2016 and now set up here for the exhibition, allows visitors to have an extremely imaginative experience and fully interact with the surrounding landscape.

“An archetypal image is capable of creating a dialogue between past and present, using a language comprising of meanings that recur over time,” says Edoardo Tresoldi. “In the 16th-century cloister of the MAR, ‘Sacral’ acts as the memory of a somewhere we have already been, a familiar image that introduces the visitor to the exploration of Dante.” Besides ‘Souls’, the contemporary art section of the exhibition explores various other themes of Dante’s life and work, such as journeys, women, dreams and light. One or more artists have been chosen for each theme, to reinterpret people and place through their work for a truly artistic experience of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Photography: © Roberto Conte

The exhibition will be on display at MAR from September 1 to January 9, 2022.