Nel mezzo dell’inferno

A theatrical and experiential project in which the audience member, thanks to the use of immersive virtual reality technology, has the opportunity to undertake – just like Dante – a journey into the afterlife, coming into contact with the other world (which is both the realm of the dead and the virtual realm of immersive reality): a truly introspective experience, within the self.

Dante wrote Inferno whilst immersed in the alienating and painful experience of exile, far from home and weighed down by the burden of injustice, and it is precisely this transition in his writing and in his life that allows him to rise above it all, to find a new balance with himself and with the world, a new dimension of knowledge. The poet thus invents the possibility of creating another world, mirroring and connected to the real one, in which the self can have a direct experience of evolution and transformation: this is how modern literature begins.

In the same way, Immersive Virtual Reality brings the audience into contact with the possibility of an ‘elsewhere’, of a fantastical dimension that is not, however, an alternative or dissociated from the real one, but interconnected with it, in the belief that the fantastical and the virtual are immersed in reality far more than is commonly believed.