Niki Ulehla went to the San Francisco dump, not to throw something away, but to find something, and she pulled Dante’s entire cast of the damned out of discarded lumber, scrap metal, and abandoned leather, carved them into marionettes, and staged the Inferno right there among the mountains of our collective waste. This is the kind of beautiful perversity that reminds you why art matters, why anyone bothers making anything at all.
Because when you stage a 700-year-old vision of hell at the literal endpoint of American consumption, when you make Virgil and Beatrice dance on strings cut from our own garbage, you’re not just putting on a puppet show, you’re holding up a mirror made of trash that reflects something so brutally honest it makes your chest tight. The circles of hell rendered in actual detritus, the punishment fitting the crime in ways Dante never imagined, performed at the place where hope supposedly gets abandoned but somehow, impossibly, gets found instead.
See the whole damned thing, every puppet, every circle, every piece of resurrected trash performing Dante’s Inferno puppet show as recycled materials performance art… click here.