A haunting series by photographer Massimiliano Corteselli surveying the human element to the wildfires in the mediterranean region. Corteselli was born in 1994 in Tivoli, a small town near Rome. He completed his studies at the Ostkreuz School of Photography in Berlin. In 2022, Corteselli received a working grant from the VG Bild-Kunst/Kulturwerk Foundation for his project “Contrapasso.”
In the first part of The Divine Comedy, Dante sets out on a journey through hell with the Roman poet Virgil, meeting deceased people suffering eternal punishments resembling the sin they committed. The principle that the punishment should be relevant to the crime is known as “contrapasso.” In the Mediterranean, many of the wildfires are man-made, either due to real estate speculation, the clearing of land for agriculture or other economic reasons. In areas where formal authority has been eroded, fire is used as a form of vengeance. Corrupt politicians may set fires in order to receive funding from the central government, pocketing a portion for themselves. Some fire-fighters light the fires they fight in an attempt to get more job security. Ultimately, investigating the causes of wildfires can lead to the spreading of rumours or stories that Corteselli believes contain biblical or 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.”