Incursions in space

The show was organized for the presentation of the book Ridotti in stracci (cit. n. 17) in Alberto Peola's Torinese gallery and re-invokes the relationship and contrast between stone and cloth utilized in the grand installation Samsara.

For this occasion, the courtyard of the Palazzo Pretorio in Arezzo, home to the Municipal Library, has been transformed into ambient sculpture.

Samsara, in Sanskrit, means 'to turn in a circle' and is the passage of the soul between birth and death, the cycle of existence.

Once again a dramatic event has provided the theme for one of Maria Dompè's installations. In this case the work refers explicitly to the bombing of the Accademia dei Georgofili in Florence in the summer of 1993. The building was destroyed, six people were killed and the Uffizi Gallery suffered great damage.

The atrocities of war in the former Yugoslavia, the carnage and mass rapes, have influenced Maria Dompè's creation of this work filled with social messages.

Planned originally for the show Progetto marmo e pietra (Project Marble and Stone) (Rome, Scuderie di Palazzo Ruspoli, January, 1993) the work was refused by the organizing committee, which held that the use of the swastika was ambiguous despite the work's title which clearly calls it an Aberrazione (Aberration).

Maria Dompè's participation in this important exhibition was a direct result of a year spent in Japan.

On the wave of the emotion caused by the terrible assassinations in the summer of 1992, that resulted in the deaths of two magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, along with their bodyguards, Dompè created a genuine funeral monument.

The work, created for the annual show of the Roman galleries, appears as a round pavilion made up by twenty pairs of intertwined heraldic dolphins.

For her personal exhibition, Dompè chose – homage to Rome - a perfectly Roman theme, recreating the Terme (Roman Baths), the favorite center of Roman social life.