Visitors to the National Film and Sound Archive’s first art commission can expect to go on a weird descent through the circles of a modern-day hell before reaching their ultimate destination, says arts editor HELEN MUSA. 

The consequence of an artist’s residence at the archive in January, Inferno is the brainchild of artist Mikaela Stafford, and owes some, but not all, of its inspiration to The Divine Comedy, by medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri. 

But there’ll be no wise Virgil to guide the protagonist through the circles, nor an angelic Beatrice to show the way to Paradise and Stafford, an illustrious Sydney College of the Arts and anyway, RMIT graduate, has been just as inspired by surprising finds in the lower depths of the archive.

I’m talking to her by WhatsApp to Paris, where she’s been living since June last year, close enough to her mum, who has retired to a village in the Bordeaux region. 

“I’ve been trying to find a way to get to Europe for a while,” she says, “and Paris seems to hit all the various points in my life… it’s a walking city and I can also ride my bike.”

Because most of her work is digital, she says, she has the luxury of being able to move around, but Paris hits the spot as a centre of creativity.

She spent January in Canberra on a residency at the NFSA, “an amazing self-led journey”, she says, one with a great deal of support from archive staff. 

Starting with short films, audio, props and costumes, all of which built foundations, she was taken into the physical storage vaults offsite in a large refrigerated room, but all the while she had senior curator at the gallery Tara Marynowsky guiding her, so it wasn’t a random search. 

The idea gelled when she was shown Dark City, a 1998 neo-noir science fiction film directed by Aussie filmmaker Alex Proyas and largely shot at Fox Studios.

In it, Rufus Sewell plays an amnesiac man who wakes up in a hotel bathtub near the corpse of a murdered woman, then is warned to flee from a group of pale men in trench coats “the Strangers”. 

Marynowsky showed her costumes related to the film and Stafford went back twice, although she spent more blissful summer time sitting in the courtyard at the NFSA, sketching and making connections, also chatting freely with the production team about sculptural possibilities. 

The idea of linking it up to Dante‘s Inferno only occurred to her back in Paris – “a hybrid idea, somewhat formed from Dark City that follows the trajectory of a character who wakes up in a bathtub, doesn’t know where they are, and then goes on an epic journey to figure it out, through shifting realities.”

Dante, too, goes on a relentless round of circles and experiences shifting realities, as when he sees fortune-tellers and soothsayers walking with their heads on backwards. 

So, what will we actually see?

First up, there will be a large, two-dimensional graphic sculpture that the NFSA calls “a large tome inscribed with other-worldly epic poetry scrawl”. 

The central part is an unnerving 2.4m-high liquid resin sculpture generated by an internal robotic so that the other-worldly form appears to ooze, “as if the sculpture has climbed out of the screen,” Stafford says.

Behind all of them is a massive 14m LED screen showing a seven-minute looped animation about a character who falls from grace, travels in an unknown world without any sense of direction, then ultimately finds that the only way is forward. 

“This is a journey into the unknown” Stafford says, “There is no dialogue, only music created by [Melbourne composer] Kate Durman, and it’s all in black-and-white. 

“It’s an image of a world that I imagined and animated, but the character meets creatures on the way and that may be a bit deferential to Dante.”

Finally, her character descends to an abyss. And where does that lead? – into Purgatory – but that’s another story in a planned three-part series that had its genesis at the NFSA. 

To be continued… in Paris, maybe.

Inferno, the National Film and Sound Archive, until November 16. Free event.