2025
Poesia, invidia la cristallografia is a sound installation by Roberto Paci Dalò based on the writings of the Russian-Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938). The work features, alongside the voice of the author, the actual recorded voice of the poet himself. An acoustic environment that quite literally takes us inside O.M.’s mind, immersing us in his extraordinary reflections on the commedia.
In the summer of 1933, Mandelstam managed to dictate Conversation on Dante to his wife Nadezhda, who, during a time of famine and shortage of everything, had managed to find a ream of paper. Mandelstam was overflowing with ideas about Dante and had learned Italian in order to understand him more deeply, but in the 1930s, his life was overwhelmed by a regime that did not send him straight to the gallows, as had happened to many artists, poets, and writers, but instead chose to keep him alive, reduce him to silence, and in 1938 send him to a gulag in Vladivostok, many thousands of kilometres from Leningrad and Moscow. A gulag he never managed to reach, dying of hardship along the way.
