Apnea / Maria Domenica Rapicavoli 2023

Maria Domenica Rapicavoli presents the installation Crooked Incline and a selection of photographic works from the Maxiprocesso series, produced at the C.I.D.M.A. in Corleone. The Sicilian artist, now based in New York, explores the relationship between memory and the present through a visual practice capable of evoking the sensations generated by places and contexts imbued with history, yet often rendered invisible within contemporary everyday life.
The underlying theme is the notion of apnea, the experience of descending into the depths of the sea through the suspension of breath, entering an estranging dimension of silence, mystery, and wonder, but also of anxiety, apprehension, and secrecy. Silence, suspension, invisibility, stillness, and unease thus become the perceptual categories through which the artist interprets an earthly reality that is equally obscure and unfathomable.
The large-scale installation Crooked Incline, presented in the central pavilion, evokes a silence that is at once captivating and unsettling. Plumb lines, ordinary tools used in construction, are transformed into suspended bombs, frozen a moment before detonation. Aligned in space, they trace maps of off-limits areas of the Mediterranean or evoke the invisible trajectories of military drones: traces of a reality withdrawn from view, and a metaphor for a latent trauma and for our difficulty in responding to the logic of contemporary political and economic power balances.
This universe of invisible mysteries is echoed in the exhibition’s second section, devoted to the Sicilian Mafia, a particularly painful wound for the artist. In the smaller gallery, thirteen images are presented from the Faldoni series—360 works in the complete project—devoted to prominent Mafia figures and to the prosecution’s closing arguments in the Maxiprocesso against Cosa Nostra. Held in the Ucciardone prison bunker courtroom in Palermo between 1986 and 1987, with 475 defendants, the trial represented one of the first fundamental responses of the Italian state to the Sicilian Mafia.
The images convey a heavy silence, associated with the secrecy surrounding investigations and the culture of omertà, but also with the doubt and uncertainty that continue to surround the country’s deepest mysteries. It is a silence that suspends every verdict, transforms time into a state of perpetual stillness, and consigns the pain of death to memory.
At the centre of the room, the sculpture Apnea evokes the theme of death in profoundly tragic terms: the contracted respiratory muscle recalls the moment when the executioner prevents the victim from crying out through strangulation. The section is completed by images of unmarked graves belonging to deceased Mafia figures and scenes of everyday life among those who inhabit these territories, at times immersed in forms of unconscious complicity.

The project as a whole thus evokes a suspended and invisible reality in which memory, violence, fear, and repression coexist within an apparently frozen temporality: a society immersed in an eternal apnea.