Maria Domenica Rapicavoli

Maria D. Rapicavoli (MDR) was born in Catania. She lives and works in New York.

Her reflection focuses on the relationship between visibility and invisibility, between tangible phenomena and immaterial consequences, between the abstract structures of politics, economy, power and the daily life of each individual. Questioning the dominant and universally accepted historical narrative, Rapicavoli proposes a critical reinterpretation of the past and its effects on present society.

Rapicavoli has always felt the need to touch upon relevant issues in her work. Her native Sicily has offered to her the initial contents, which then become wider: corruption and legality, silence and omertà, memory and its erasure; and what an archive is, what its value is, what the potential and limits of an image or a work are.

This is how the MAXIPROCESSO project was born, in which the Sicilian artist has documented the so-called Maxi-Trial, the biggest trial for mafia crimes, held in Palermo between February 1986 and December 1987. Starting from the awareness of the precarious conditions of the entire document archive of the first instance trial – kept at the International Documentary Center of Mafia and the No Mafia Movement (CIDMA), in Corleone – Rapicavoli decided to take pictures, between 2015 and 2018, of all the folders, thus creating the homonymous series of 360 photographs.

So the artist was confronted, through images, with the theme of justice, memory and history, including recent history, of the country.