Edoardo Tresoldi has unveiled the latest of his signature wire mesh cathedrals, with his installation titled “Sacral” currently on display in the Italian city of Ravenna. Designed for the Dante exhibition at the MAR, Ravenna’s art museum, Sacral is currently on display in the museum’s cloister until January 9th, 2022.

The installation forms part of “A POP Saga,” the third exhibition in the “Dante. The Eyes and the Mind” series at the MAR. In the design of Sacral, Tresoldi drew inspiration from the Noble Castle in Dante’s Inferno, a symbolic place inhabited by the souls of those who left honor and fame behind after death. “They are the great souls of antiquity,” says Tresoldi, “philosophers, poets, scientists and writers — with grave and slow-moving eyes. People who were great in their earthly lives because of their moral qualities but who are destined to eternal suffering because they lack the theological virtues.”

The installation is set within the MAR’s 16th-century cloister, part of a former monastery. The design allows visitors to physically enter the installation and observe a fragmented dome massing, which transitions into cubic forms as it radiates outwards. Tresoldi originally designed the installation in 2016, and was subsequently invited to include the piece in MAR’s exhibition, who saw the piece as an “ideal representation of Dante’s Castle of the Great Souls,” offering visitors an “extremely imaginative experience, and to fully interact with the surrounding landscape.”

“An archetypal image is capable of creating a dialogue between past and present, using a language comprising of meanings that recur over time,” says Tresoldi. “In the 16th-century cloister of the MAR, Sacral acts as the memory of a somewhere we have already been, a familiar image that introduces the visitor to the exploration of Dante”.

Sacral is the latest in a series of wire mesh installations by Tresoldi. In 2018, the artist designed three cathedrals for the Coachella festival in California, one of which was subsequently put on display in Rome in 2020. In July of last year, Tresoldi designed a series of 46 pillars forming a colonnade along the Italian seaside town of Reggio Clabria. Also in 2020, the artist unveiled a large-scale wire mesh sculpture suspended from the ceiling of the Cathédrale restaurant in New York City.