DIS-ARMA-MI

An Interactive Performance Installation.

A gentle yet radical invitation to explore our personal forms of defense….This is not a spectacle to be observed, but an experience to be inhabited. N.Perlingieri – Made in Pompei

Premiered in Naples, Italy at Casa Morra, sponsored by Fonderia Nolana, in partnership with the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples & with the support of the Royal Armouries Museum, UK.

DIS-ARMA-MI opens an embodied meditative space, on the challenges of exposing and being exposed.

A person stands on a plinth, encased in a wearable sculpture - an armour made of soap.

Audience members are invited to wash this fragile surface with water, using sponges or bare hands. 

As the soap dissolves, the physical and psychological boundaries between bodies (self and other) are slowly eroded, revealing the performer behind the defense within. 

Through this collaborative act of washing, DIS-ARMA-MI becomes a ritual of shared experience and transformation; a gentle dismantling of control and guardedness, allowing space for trust, connection, collective experience and responsibility to emerge.

Honoring slowness, the sculpture transforms into a shifting landscape, shaped by the audience’s touch, moving in form and meaning: reframing armour from a symbol of war into a surface for care.

THE REMAINS  

After the performance, the residual soap garment is preserved and displayed as a sculptural relic. It functions as

both evidence and metaphor: the remains of an encounter where boundaries between protection and exposure,

performer and participant, were gently negotiated and undone.

Credits:

Concept | Director | Producer: Anton Mirto 

Performer: Ailbhe Murphy                             

Sculpture Supervisor | Main Sponsor: Prof. Antonio del Giudice of Fonderia Nolana

Assistants:

Clay Modelling | Design: Yulia Kryshchuk 

Soap Modelling: Isabella Petruzzi, Mariarita Ferronetti, and Diana Magri

Performance Management: Serena Pisano & Isabella Petruzzi

Project Production Support: Sara Guidi, Chiara Rauseo, Alberto Duman, Maria D’Ambrosio, Antonio Capone, Emanuela Di Guglielmo, Francesco Falanga, and Nicola Gabriele

Sound Composers: Anais de Martino and Kon Tsits                 

Sound Engineers: Roberto Salernitano and Paolo Petraroli

Live Singing: Laura Cuomo

Relevant Links:

Prototype 1

Making Of

Press Review