Circles of Hell
A unique collaborative endeavor in the Romanian cultural landscape.
THE FIRST CIRCLE: LIMBO
Dan Dediu (B. 1967) / Eugen Dediu (B. 1996)
„We crossed the waters, treading as on ice,
Then passed through seven gates where dampness clings,
Till shade and verdant peace became our prize.”
An imaginary space perched on the edge of an abyss, yet relatively safe and shielded from the fierce catastrophes of Hell, Limbo has something of a “figurative non-figurative” painting. That’s why, over the two obsessive guitar melodies—which eventually become singable—only silhouettes and places appear: recurring, haunting, fragmentarily captured in a segmented visual pulse. Only the worm becomes a symbol of infiltration from and into darkness, the main character of the story, cast in the green color of hope—a torrential and magmatic green, present at the beginning, middle, and end of
our audio-visual proposal.
Dan Dediu (b. 1967) studied composition in Bucharest and Vienna. He has composed over 180 works covering almost all musical genres. He is the recipient of numerous national and international composition awards and serves as the artistic director of the International Week of New Music Festival. He is a professor of composition, artistic director of the Profil ensemble, and between 2008–2016, was rector of the National University of Music Bucharest. In June 2022, he was elected President of the Union of Romanian Composers and Musicologists.
Eugen Dediu (b. 1996) is a director and screenwriter, a graduate in film and TV directing from UNATC “I.L. Caragiale”, where he also earned his PhD in film. Since 2018, he has been working in the film industry, writing and directing a number of short films (both fiction and documentaries), screened and awarded at various national and international festivals. He is currently preparing his feature film debut and directed the opera performance D’ale carnavalului.
THE SECOND CIRCLE: LUST
Diana Rotaru (b. 1981) / Alexandru-Claudiu Maxim (b. 1990)
„No grief more deep in sorrow’s heavy flow
Than memory’s light of joys that once had shone,
Now fading where the bitter shadows grow.”
Far from the terrible storms tormenting those who surrendered to carnal passions in the second circle of Dante’s Inferno, my Hell is charming, hypnotic, playful, and welcoming: a peaceful manifesto against the perennial and unjust religiously “justified” shaming of feminine sensuality, as well as the astonishing inclusion of sex among the most dreadful sins. Inspired by E. E. Cummings’ brilliant poem „may i feel said he”, I created a miniature theme and variations in which flirtation — seen as a social dance — branches into a verbal polyphony and then into an angelic choir of fairies (Irina Perneș and Ana Creangă), accompanied by the crystalline, repetitive mechanisms of the guitars.
The short film LUST explores contemporary desire in the form of algorithmic damnation. Structured into three layers — reality, digital hell, and empty interiority — seen through the eyes of a modern sinner, the film reinterprets Dante’s second circle through everyday gestures (swipes), 3D ghosts of longing, and spaces generated using robotic industrial vision systems. Technologies such as Gaussian Splatting and Depth Maps become tools of memory and punishment. The result is a raw, unresolved meditation on touchless desire and endless gazing.
Diana Rotaru (b. 1981) has composed chamber and orchestral music, stage works, short film scores, and chamber operas. Her music explores diverse expressive directions such as hypnagogia, imaginary folklore, or humor. She studied with Ștefan Niculescu, Dan Dediu (UNMB), and Frédéric Durieux (CNSMDP), and met numerous composers during summer courses, including Salvatore Sciarrino, Jonathan Harvey, and Brian Ferneyhough. She has received awards such as the “Enescu” Prize (2003, 2005), ISCM-IAMIC Young Composer Award (2008), and the Irino Prize (Tokyo, 2004), as well as residencies in Paris (Cité des Arts, 2007), Vienna (KulturKontakt, 2015), and Winterthur (Villa Straulli, 2011). She is CIMRO coordinator and associate professor at UNMB. Since 2019, she has served as president of SNR-SIMC and artistic director of the MERIDIAN Festival.
Alexandru-Claudiu Maxim (b. 1990) is a visual artist who explores themes such as absurdity, irony, and the powerful emotions that govern human nature. His work addresses topics such as the inevitability of death and its perception in the contemporary imagination, the passage of time and how it manifests, and the choices made between the extremes of existence — as well as what love means as a form of presence. Since 2017, Maxim has been part of the artistic group Pastila Roz (which includes Beaver and Marian Codrea), known for its satirical, jovial, and nonconformist spirit, contributing to numerous artistic projects. He was the manager of The Art Machine, a unique art vending machine launched in Bucharest in 2019. The Art Machine marks an innovative beginning for democratizing art and boosting art collecting in Romania.
THE THIRD CIRCLE: GREED
Sebastian Androne-Nakanishi (b. 1989) / Anita M. Frâncu (b. 1991)
„But you, still living—tell me what you seek!
Depart from those whose souls to death are wed;
No breath of grace redeems the lost and weak.”
Greed is a six-part piece that explores, through two guitars and a band, a descent from the collective to the individual, from the external to the internal, from chaos to essence. The first five sections are constructed palindromically, like an arc traversing varying degrees of (de)humanization — from Them All to Me with Myself, and back to Us All. This process is both an uncovering and a collapse, a mirror of how identity and intention fragment under the pressure of the impulse to desire.
Conceptually, the piece reflects Greed not only as a vice but also as a generative force — that primal instinct which animates the creative act. For every form created, there is a process of consumption, of devouring. Greed can thus be seen, paradoxically, as a condition of creation. In this light, the final section, Between, breaks the symmetry and offers an unexpected perspective: a fragment based on the improvisation of the composer’s four-year-old son. Here, free from any stylistic or cultural constraints, the discourse reduces to an essential sonic gesture, devoid of artifice — like a revelation of simplicity after excess.
The visual dimension unfolded in close dialogue with Sebastian Androne-Nakanishi’s six-part musical structure. It was an experience felt with the eyes, the heart, and the imagination—a descent from the collective into the individual, seen through the lens of a consuming passion: greed. In the opening phase, landscapes built from AI-generated sequences overlap with fragments of the creative process, conjuring a contemporary inferno—a world overflowing with chaos and desire, where even technology becomes complicit in excess. From this turbulence emerges intimacy: fleeting glimpses of personal creation, accelerated visual gestures, instinctive marks, mixed-media paintings in black ink, charcoal, and natural pigments. The work pulses with the energy of hands at play, of thought and feeling intertwined. The finale, corresponding to the Between section, shifts the tone. Here, the act of crafting an icon on linden wood, gilded with gold, brings a quiet radiance—a material that evokes light, incorruptibility, and the possibility of transcendence.
Sebastian Androne-Nakanishi (b. 1989) is a Romanian composer internationally acclaimed for his contemporary concert music, characterized by rich sonic imagination and structural clarity. His works have been performed by renowned ensembles such as the Diotima Quartet, BBC Singers, Shanghai Philharmonic, and Tonhalle Zürich Orchestra. A winner of the “George Enescu” Prize and the “Composer of the Year” distinction awarded by the International Classical Music Awards in 2022, Sebastian also composes film music, winning the Crystal Pine trophy in 2024 for the film “Enescu, Taken Alive.”
Anita M. Frâncu (b. 1991, Brașov) is a visual artist who explores, through mixed media, the symbolic and sensory dimensions of existence, balancing between the abstract and the figurative. Her works create a dialogue between vulnerability, spirituality, and plastic expression, inviting the viewer to a profound reflection on the human condition.
THE FOURTH CIRCLE: AVARICE
George-Ioan Păiş (b. 1994) / Nichita Stamate (b. 1995)
„Here do they clash, then backward wheel once more,
And turn in endless circles, loud they cry:
‘Why hoard you so?’ ‘Why squander what you store’ …”
We truly collaborated in every sense of the word, with part of the creative process taking place at the same table—cutting, assembling, and composing (in the sense of “putting together,” a kind of artistic bricolage) the final product. From the beginning, we both opted for a very close relationship between music and image, with the strategy being that the two would create a shared aesthetic universe—somewhat frenetic, disjointed, and at times chaotic. I believe we reflected part of the theme of our chosen circle in the repetitive, obsessive sequences.
Musically, I tried to render Avarice also through a certain miserliness of compositional means. I used the electronic part as a third performer, with certain passages where the boundaries of the musical relationship become diffuse — do the guitars support the tape, or does the tape fortify the acoustic instruments?
I wanted to illustrate a broader spectrum of embodiments of Avarice, whether it’s about the chase for money or the exploitation of the environment or other people. It’s a state of soul that deforms and I tried to render this through all kinds of deformations. I opted for many of the mechanical passages made by George to punctuate them with various words associated with a circle of hell (Suffering, Greed, Miserliness, Oppression etc.), written in a personal alphabet that allows the arrangement of letters in such a manner as to form geometric seals.
George-Ioan Păiș (b. 1994) is a composer who works at the border between genres, combining the appetite for jazz harmonies, the vitality and dynamism of heavy metal music, and the rigor of traditional constructions. Besides his classical music activity, George Păiș works as composer and performer in the trio Opening Theory, a jazz-fusion formation whose sonorities traverse electronic music and progressive rock.
Nichita Stamate (b. 1995) is a visual artist, writer, philosopher, and world-builder. The receptacle of a vast interior universe, with an interest in history, architecture, languages and signs, and preoccupied with perfecting a fantastic world, his creations can be seen as forming a continuum, a separate visual world that involves text, inspirations from linguistics, and a special preoccupation with calligraphy and writing systems. His architectural studies find their echo both in his visual creation and in other fields where he has been active, such as graphic design or product design, being a member of the A0plus studio.
THE FIFTH CIRCLE: WRATH
Gabriel Mălăncioiu (b. 1979) / Alexandra Duță (b. 2001)
„We entered that deep trench which girds the town
of those in sorrow, inconsolable,
whose wall appears as if it were made of iron.”
Inspired by unconventional techniques of using the guitar that, in my ears, murmured of seething Wrath, the piece began to take shape. The electronic background is a small universe in itself, a complementary plane that dialogues with the two guitars: the sound of a piece of ice melting in a hot pan, industrial rustling, whispers from nature, the sound of a sword splitting the air, glissando along a zither string.
Inspired by unconventional techniques of using the guitar that, in my ears, murmured of seething Wrath, the piece began to take shape. The electronic background is a small universe in itself, a complementary plane that dialogues with the two guitars: the sound of a piece of ice melting in a hot pan, industrial rustling, whispers from nature, the sound of a sword splitting the air, glissando along a zither string.
The music of Gabriel Mălăncioiu (b. 1979) has been presented to audiences on five continents in over 400 concerts, being performed by prestigious ensembles such as Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Chamber Choir of Slovenia, or the Aventure ensemble, performers such as Florian Mueller, Gudrun Hinze, or Richard Craig, conductors such as Michael Wendeberg, Huba Hollókői, or Martina Batič. Composer Corneliu Dan Georgescu noted that Gabriel Mălăncioiu is “one of the most active personalities, a self-confident and very original voice in the contemporary musical landscape”. His scores are published by Universal Edition.
Alexandra Cristina Duță (b. 2001) is a visual artist specialized in 3D and digital art, interested in the relationship between human, identity, and environment, against the backdrop of inner and social tensions. Her practice combines graphics, animation, and digital installation, exploring themes such as consumerism, the struggle with human impulses, or the dissolution of the self. In her recent projects, she uses different types of software to create visual experiences that provoke and engage the viewer, both emotionally and physically.
THE SIXTH CIRCLE: HERESY
Cristian Lolea (b. 1977) / Ana Vîrdol (b. 1999)
„O you whose minds are sound, attend and hear,
The doctrine hid beneath this veil of rhyme,
Whose woven strangeness shrouds a meaning clear.”
Dante Alighieri’s text from the Divine Comedy — The Sixth Circle: the heretics, seven centuries later, becomes a pretext for a musical game with the listener’s perception, with different seemingly irreconcilable musical directions, with sometimes less conventional guitar approaches, and perhaps even with our artistic boundaries. The work was written in 2025 at the invitation of and for Duo Hesperus.
Flames is a frame-by-frame animation inspired by The Sixth Circle of Hell, dedicated to Heretics. The work visually reinterprets the punishment of heated stone tombs, which is rendered in an abstract way, through harsh images interrupted by completely black frames, creating an oppressive, heavy, and agitated atmosphere, which is completed by the soundtrack.
Cristian Lolea (b. 1977) is one of those composers who successfully and originally navigate vastly different musical realms, from avant-garde to pop-rock. His film scores have earned numerous awards, including the Georges Delerue Prize (2020), the Best Original Music Award at the Saint-Jean-de-Luz International Film Festival (2020), and the Gopo Award (2008). His works have been performed across Europe, America, and Asia, and have won prizes at prestigious national and international competitions, such as The Roads of Romanticism (2007 — First Prize) and the George Enescu International Composition Competition (2009 — Special Prize). They have also been featured in renowned international festivals, including the Warsaw Autumn, George Enescu Festival, and World Music Days.
Ana Vîrdol (b. 1999) holds a Master’s degree from the National University of Arts in Bucharest, specializing in graphic arts. She primarily works with traditional techniques, particularly watercolor, but also experiments with combining traditional and digital media in her visual projects, such as drawing and animation. Her artistic focus revolves around mythology, symbolism, and introspective inner spaces.
THE SEVENTH CIRCLE: VIOLENCE
Andrei Petrache (b. 1998) / Roxana Bărbulescu (b. 1995)
„’Why do you rend me so?’ the tree did wail
With blood that flowed from wounds both dark and deep:
‘Why tear my flesh? Does pity in you fail?’ ”
The project proposes an audiovisual interpretation of the theme of the seventh Circle of Hell, concentrating on Violence in its essential forms: against the other, against oneself, and against divinity, nature, or art. The intention is not illustrative, but reflexive — an exploration of shadow as a projection of the artistic self and human vulnerability in the face of pain. Violence is not treated as an innate given, but as the result of profound traumas, individual or collective, and the sinner is also seen as a victim, without being absolved of responsibility. The visual narrative unfolds exclusively through the analogical technique of shadow play, using figurines, models, and objects with varied textures, manually animated, as in a filmed puppet theater. The choice of this method accentuates the ambiguous, fragmentary, and imprecise character of the otherworld. On the sonic level, the relationship between guitarists and audio tape becomes a game of reflections and contradictions, deformed echoes of the scenic action, building together with the image a three-dimensional dimension, in which sound and visual shadow each other reciprocally.
Andrei Petrache (b. 1998) is a pianist, composer, arranger, and conductor, active on stages in Romania and abroad, with an artistic activity that extends across three continents. Double-graduate in Classical Composition and Orchestra Conducting, he is a doctoral student and associate teaching staff at UNMB. He has obtained over 30 prizes for performance and over 30 for composition, from a repertoire of over 80 works. He collaborates with prestigious ensembles and institutions, such as the “George Enescu” Philharmonic and the Radio Chamber Orchestra.
Roxana Bărbulescu (b. 1995) is an architect, graphic designer, and visual artist, working interdisciplinarily at the border between space, image, and illustration. Trained at UAUIM Bucharest and ETSAM Madrid, she combines architectural rigor with intuitive visual expressiveness. Her works include live animations, short films, visual identities, and editorial projects, developed in collaboration with artists, institutions, and independent brands. She is active in cultural initiatives in the field of performing arts, architecture, and urban research. Her practice reflects a contemporary and emotional aesthetic, articulated through a contemporary visual language.
THE EIGHTH CIRCLE: FRAUD
Dan Variu (b. 1983) / Daniel Munteanu (b. 1981)
„His face was like a righteous man’s in mien,
So kind and gentle in its outward show;
But all the rest was serpent, foul, obscene”
With a title that refers to cantos XVIII-XXXI of the Divine Comedy, the work Malebolge invites the audience to a double initiatory journey: on one hand, into the universe of motifs and symbols of the eighth circle of Dante’s Inferno, and on the other hand, into a selective history of musical and visual creations inspired by Dante Alighieri’s work. The emblematic figure of this descensus ad inferos is the mythological Geryon, with the beautiful face of a “just man” and the hideous body of a dragon, portrayed through a series of sound effects and the musical leitmotif “che mostri buona faccia”, a phrase cut from a medieval caccia signed by Andrea da Firenze: Dal traditor, thus also preparing the next circle. The sonic gallery of the ten sins subsumed under the circle of Fraud is the result of repeated metamorphoses of this theme, in poly- and metastylistic exercises, which try to emphasize the divine reasoning of punishments, the so-called contrapasso specific to the Divine Comedy.
As a starting point I had the original text from Dante’s Inferno, more precisely the eighth circle, Malebolge. I synthesized the verses and wrote prompts to use artificial intelligence (AI) according to the illustrations I had to make. It was an interesting process to train the computer and make the necessary modifications to obtain results in novel styles that would also express part of my own artistic vision.
Dan Variu (b. 1983) studied composition with masters Hans Peter Türk and Cornel Țăranu at the “Gheorghe Dima” Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca, where, in 2016, he defended his doctorate with a thesis entitled Style as a Compositional Parameter, elaborated under the guidance of Professor Cristian Misievici and published in 2020, by Presa Universitară Clujeană publishing house. His theoretical concerns are complementary to his compositional language, which cultivates polystylistic play, with the aim of obtaining a wide range of aesthetic effects, ranging from comic to tragic, aspects found in a series of choral, chamber, vocal-symphonic, and operatic creations, performed in several concert institutions in Romania, Moldova, Germany, and France.
Daniel Munteanu (b. 1981) is a Romanian visual artist and photographer, known for the long-term project Transience and for the way he explores the fragility of memory, the transformation of spaces, and the ephemerality of human presence in seemingly ordinary landscapes. His works combine documentary with a poetic approach, offering a visual reflection on time, identity, and the relationship between man and environment.
THE NINTH CIRCLE: TREACHERY
Violeta Dinescu (b. 1953) / Vlad Basarab (b. 1977)
„I would gather into words all the torment it contains;
but since I have no blades sharp enough,
I speak with fear and with a trembling voice.
This is the center, where Cocytus lies.”
Inspired by Canto XXXII of the Inferno, the piece evokes the bottom of the ninth circle of Hell – a vast frozen lake, Cocytus – where the souls of traitors to kin are eternally embedded in ice. The work is structured as a Vuza rhythmic canon for six voices, considered as a musical form. The canon uses the internal rhythm (0, 19, 23, 24, 30, 36, 43, 47, 60, 66, 67, 71) and the external rhythm (0, 22, 38, 40, 54, 56).
The piece reflects the struggle and, at the same time, the harmony between the static and the dynamic, between the liquid and solid states of water, which—phenomenologically and sensorially—can facilitate meditative and melancholic states. The icy skin crossed by flowing water evokes the circulation of vital fluid within an inert body. We are at the border between sensation and extinction, where even the dismantled body is trapped by the clench of cold, suspended between decay and preservation.
The freeze is the proper medium for a liminal state of numbness, a space that belongs neither to death nor to life. In this context, water is caught between exercising and simultaneously denying its vocation as an element of purification and vitality.
The traitor himself exists in a liminal state until Treachery materializes. He lives suspended between two worlds, moves between them, and yet belongs to neither—the one he betrays, nor the one to which he dedicates his betrayal. A survival on the edge, a life in numb stasis, running on emergency until the moment of rupture. Cocytus, the circle of treachery in the form of the frozen lake at the deepest part of Hell, thus extends the state of perpetual waiting—an endless anticipation for organisms trapped in the grip of ice.
Violeta Dinescu (b. 1953) is a composer and university professor who has lived in Germany since 1982. Her oeuvre spans a wide range of genres and has been recognized with numerous national and international awards.
Vlad Basarab (b. 1977) is a visual artist working with multimedia installations, ceramics, sculpture, performance, and video. He has held over 20 solo exhibitions in the United States, China, Romania, and Hungary. His works are included in important international public and private collections in China, Taiwan, the USA, South Korea, Romania, Hungary, Moldova, Croatia, Switzerland, and Germany.
Basarab holds a PhD in visual arts (National University of Arts, Bucharest, 2023). In 2013, he returned to Romania after 18 years abroad as a Fulbright scholar. In 2001, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the University of Alaska Anchorage, and in 2013 a Master of Fine Arts in Multimedia from West Virginia University, USA.
In 2020, he received the Award for Art in Public Space from the Union of Visual Artists and the Romanian Ministry of Culture. In 2017, he received the Excellence Award at the Cluj International Ceramics Biennale.
In 2014, he won first prize in the International Competition for the Design of the Romanian Language Monument, organized by the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Moldova.
Fotografii: Daniel Munteanu
Curator: Maria Pașc
Traduceri: Alexandru M. Călin