Alex Dorici, Installation Rope 98 Meters Slack

Alex Dorici
Installation Rope 98 Meters – Slack

Opening Saturday, June 27 2026
From 7.30 pm to 9.30 pm

In collaboration with Arte 50, Cureglia (Switzerland)

Dep Art Out is delighted to present Installation Rope 98 Meters – Slack, a new project by Alex Dorici created specifically for the trullo in Ceglie Messapica.

With this installation, Dorici marks a new chapter in the Installation Rope series, developed over the years through taut lines, rigid geometries and structures capable of redefining architecture and space through a strong constructive tension. Dorici’s poetics are based on the idea that space is not a neutral container, but an active material that can be reconstructed, altered and perceived differently.
In his most iconic series, the rope becomes a spatial line that replaces the traditional mark of drawing. Thanks to these necessarily site-specific projects, his works have become part of public and private collections, with installations both indoors and outdoors.

In the project conceived for Dep Art Out, the artist abandons the rigidity of the straight line for the first time to engage with the curve, with weight and with gravity. The rope is no longer used as an element that imposes order and control on the space, but allows itself to be permeated by suspension, by sagging, by instability.
This radical shift stems from direct engagement with the architecture of the trullo: an ancestral space built of dry stone, where vernacular dimensions and an almost sacred tension coexist in balance. Faced with such a strong and distinctive structure, Dorici deliberately eschews any monumental or invasive gesture, opting instead for a light, organic, silent presence, magically suspended.
The ropes descend from the central dome, forming large catenaries that traverse the space in a free and unstable manner. Some remain suspended in mid-air, one skims the floor, another deliberately extends beyond, leaving part of the rope lying on the ground. A suspended knot at the centre of the space can be reached by the visitor who, by interacting with the work, slightly alters the design and balance of the lines.

The choice of white stems from a desire to establish a subtle visual harmony with the trullo: during the day, the rope tends to blend in with the architecture and the natural light, creating a delicate interplay of appearances, voids and subtle tensions. This dialogue has long been part of Dorici’s research, in which light is never merely a scenographic element, but a device capable of radically altering the behaviour of the work and the relationship between presence and absence.
With the activation of the UV lamps, the perceptual balance between architecture and installation is completely overturned. Whilst during the day it is the rope that gives way to the material force of the trullo, in the nocturnal dimension it is instead the architecture that visually recedes, allowing the luminous presence of the rope to emerge, seeming to float in space like a suspended, immaterial drawing.

Installation Rope 98 Meters – Slack thus marks a decisive moment in the artist’s practice: the line loses its authoritative and constructive character to become vulnerable, mutable and sensitive to gravity, time and human presence.
Rather than occupying the space, the work seems to listen to it.

Web: www.depart.it/it/evento-ale...