Kimberly Campanello, This Knot (2024-)

“My versioning of Dante’s Commedia is at once highly personal and ‘universal’ in Dante’s visionary sense of ‘la forma universal di questo nodo / the universal shape of this knot’. I trace the knotted threads of MY birthplace in Elkhart, Indiana, traditional lands of the Pokégnek Bodéwadmik (Pokagon Potawatomi), My family origins in Volturara Appula (Puglia, Italy), and my experience of young onset Parkinson’s disease.

“I approach my version of Dante with procedures, rituals, maps, and other voices, in and out of time. The archive is vast, and it is made of skins of long-dead animals and trees and traces of hands copying, commenting, annotating, redacting, falsifying, digitising.

“Just as a fifteenth century folio of the Commedia is described in the British Library catalogue, I begin imperfectly, and I am wanting the desired (not side) effect of translation – or is it my Parkinson’s medication – in the face of degeneration.

“The pain lifts when I carry Dante’s words over, a knot with many threads, still attached to the loom.”    —The Poet K