Massimiliano Corteselli

Contrapasso

“And thus, in me one sees the law of counter-penalty”
(XXVIII, 142) – From The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

In Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy, the contrapasso represents eternal punishment by a process either resembling or contrasting with the committed sin. Many of the wildfires in the Mediterranean are man-made; due to real estate speculation, the clearing of land for agriculture as well as other economic reasons.  In some areas, where institutions are weaker, fire is used as a form of vengeance. In other instances, fires are facilitated by corruption in order to obtain funding to divert part of the money, or to create or maintain jobs. Due to the difficulty of investigating the causes of wildfires, people spread rumours and tell tales about them which, in my view, contain biblical and archetypal themes. In Contrapasso I create an analogy between Dante’s Inferno and the wildfires in the Mediterranean region and reinterpret them as a divine punishment. In the modern, globalised world the relation between cause and effect is not always clear. It’s becoming more important than ever to think about the way our actions as human beings unleash a vicious cycle of causality, that will eventually come back to plague us.

Project presented in Giovane Fotografia Italiana 11 | Contaminations

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BIO

Massimiliano Corteselli
(Tivoli, 1994)