VIDEODANTE#India_Episode IV

In Eternal Exile, the journey extends beyond physical and spiritual borders, evoking the sense of displacement that marked Dante’s own life and still resonates deeply today. This episode reflects on the condition of the exile—not only as a historical or political reality, but as an existential state. The protagonist becomes a wanderer suspended between worlds, searching for belonging in a fragmented landscape.

Through a poetic fusion of Indian and Italian performance traditions, Eternal Exile explores themes of identity, memory, and uprootedness. The body becomes a vessel of longing, carrying the weight of invisible boundaries and lost homelands.

This chapter speaks to our contemporary moment, where exile takes many forms—geographical, emotional, cultural—and where the act of crossing becomes both trauma and transformation.

In his poem, Dante often mentions India, the Ganges river and, as per tradition of the time, places the heaven on earth in the Indian territory. India therefore struck, with its wonders, the mind of the poet, who, imagining the East, saw the sun rise from the Ganges.

The project was born from the remote collaboration between Instabili Vaganti, the Indian classical dancer Anuradha Venkataraman and the Indian association Culture Monks, thanks to the production of the Italian Institute of Cultural of New Delhi and the Italian Consulate of Kolkata, in order to explore the numerous connections between Dante’s work and Indian culture, both from an iconographic, philosophical and theological point of view.

The work of investigation and collection of suggestions on parts of The Divine Comedy will be aimed at the production of seven different video episodes, exactly like 7 are the days spent by Dante in the otherworldly journey. These episodes will compose a series addressed specifically to the web audience through the platforms and  the social media channels of the company and of the Italian Institute of Cultural of New Delhi, in order to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the death of the great poet.

Each short video will foresee various artistic collaborations, in Italy and India.