The Week of the Italian Language in the World is full of Dantean events and more at the Italian Cultural Institute in Bogotà.
On 19, 20 and 21 October the Italian Cultural Institute presents ‘L’uomo prima della soglia’ (The Man Before the Threshold), a theatrical performance by the director and actor Salvatore Motta. The show is a journey through Cantos I, III and V of Inferno, Canto I of Purgatorio and Canto XXXIII of Paradiso, in which Dante’s verses dialogue with texts by Emmanuel Swedenborg, William Blake, John Milton, San Juan de la Cruz and Jorge Luis Borges. On Tuesday 19 and Wednesday 20, the show will be held at the Mario Laserna Auditorium at Los Andes University of Bogotà; on Thursday 21 it will be at at the Tribu Art Club. The video of the show will be published on the YouTube channel of the Italian Cultural Institute.
On Wednesday 19 October the Italian Cultural Institute presents the online conference ‘Dante fragmentos de imagen’, with Professor Alessandra Merlo, Professor Paolo Vignolo and the artist Jose Alejandro Restrepo. The speakers will start with the same question: what kind of relationship does Dante’s text create with images? On the one hand, the answer comes from the reading the Divine Comedy itself: words that evoke figures, apparitions, visions, and which have given rise, over the centuries, to visual representations and illustrations of certain famous characters and situations in the work. On the other hand, the question clashes with the impossibility of enclosing the Comedy in an all-encompassing, coherent, single image, as if the text were always excessive, inordinate, impossible to capture. Hence, the central theme proposed in the lecture: what can we say today about Dante’s work, starting with the contemporary reflection and practice concerning representation and images, both still and moving?
On Wednesday 20 October the Italian Cultural Institute and the Dante Alighieri Society present the online talk ‘Il dono di Dante: la vostra Commedia’ (Dante’s Gift: your Comedy), with the artist Enrico Mazzone. Mazzone, who illustrated the Divine Comedy on a 97 metre-long sheet, will talk with the teachers and students at the Leonardo da Vinci School in Bogotá, sharing teaching materials, photographs and video clips.
On Thursday 21 October the Italian Cultural Institute presents the online lecture by Professor Bruno D’Amore, ‘La Matematica nell’opera di Dante Alighieri’ (Mathematics in the Work of Dante). Prof. D’Amore will discuss a little-known aspect of Dante’s work: the attraction always held by the poet for logic, arithmetic and geometry, and which drove him to fill the Divine Comedy with deductive reasoning, numerical references and Euclidean theorems. The virtual conference will be reproduced live on Facebook on the page of the Italian Cultural Institute and the recording of the lecture will later be published on the YouTube channel.
For more information on these three events, visit iicbogota.esteri.it
In addition, from 19 to 22 October, three as yet unseen documentaries dedicated to three works by Italian artists in Colombia will be posted on the YouTube channel and on the social pages of the Embassy of Italy in Bogotá. The three works are the proscenium curtain of the Teatro Nacional de Cristobal Colón, created by Annibale Gatti, the Church of ‘Nuestra Señora del Carmen’ by Giovanni Buscaglione and the statue ‘Rebecca’ by Tito Ricci.
Find out more on the Embassy website.
