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.
Photographs: Lucia Dovere & Alberto Duman
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.
Photographs: Emanuela di Guglielmo
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
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