HELMUT  OEHRING

I N F E R N O / M A P P A ​

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From 1307 until shortly before his death in 1321 AD, Dante Alighieri wrote La Divina Commedia in exile in three parts – Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso – and laid the foundation for the Italian written language and poetry with this outstanding epic verse narrative. From 1480 onwards, Sandro Botticelli depicted the abyss of hell as described by Dante in Mappa dell'Inferno. The cyclical compositional-visual work [iɱˈfɛrno] (from: MAPPA) Contrapasso I – V (to: Vladimir Putin / Sergey Lavrov) is based in particular on this drawing, as well as on the principle of divine justice described by Dante in Inferno: Contrapasso. It states that all sins committed in life are punished ‘appropriately’ in hell. In formal terms, abstracting the complex numerical relationships, symbolic intentions and mathematical calculations underlying Dante's Inferno, the score consists of five parts and nine main layers – circles of hell. According to Dante, the seventh circle of hell is reserved for highway robbers, violent criminals, tyrants and murderers

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In a similar transformative process, such as Gerhard Richter's use of documentary photographs (for example, from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, Nuremberg's town hall square during the NSDAP's 1933 Reich Party Congress, or the isolation cells of RAF members in Stuttgart-Stammheim) as templates for his pictorial works, the audiovisual cycle [iɱˈfɛrno] (from: MAPPA) Contrapasso I – V (to: Vladimir Putin / Sergey Lavrov) is based on the speeches given by the Russian president and foreign minister at the end of February 2022, at the start of their war of aggression against Ukraine. These ‘vocal biomarkers’ were broken down in terms of declaration, syntax, grammar and content using speech analysis software such as Beyond Verbal, VoiceSense and Invoca in order to transform the DNA and neuropsychological-emotional analysis of the context of their socio-economic language and, as a result of this ‘emotion monitoring’, to take it apart, reassemble it and paint over it in the composition process. In this way, the underlying emotions and decoded-encrypted vocal intonations behind the ideology of the two Russian leaders were transformed into sound images in an infernal visual language landscape. In addition to the instrumental parts of the composition, two electroacoustic sequences were realised, as well as two sections in which the focus is exclusively on sign language choreography performed by the four instrumentalists

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From 1960 onwards, American linguist William Clarence Stokoe proved through his research at Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. that sign languages are generally fully-fledged languages, and this discovery marked the beginning of modern sign language research. Stokoe developed a written notation system for sign language based on the Latin alphabet. In 1985, the scientifically oriented Hamburg Sign Language Notation System, or HamNoSys for short, continued the tradition of Stokoe-based systems. HamNoSys is a phonetic transcription system for signs that is currently widely used. As early as the 1970s, classical dancer Valerie Sutton developed the general movement description system Sutton Movement Writing for a wide variety of visual forms in which movement plays a central role – a five-line system similar to the musical notation we are familiar with, on which simultaneous and isolated hieroglyphs/signs are depicted at varying intervals and heights. In his exploration of these transcription and notation systems for body languages, Helmut Oehring uses a specially developed SignMimo choreography in Contrapassi.