If the art of installation has to be understood as a composite concept, the visual component being only a part, perhaps even a minor part, visiting Italian artist Maria Dompe?s spiritual vision seems to claim the special attention of all who attach importance to the interaction between natural environment and architecture of the location. She spoke at length in a lecture-cum-slide show at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture on April 19.

A student of sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Rome, Dompe?s creativity has since found highly original expressions in her many outdoor installations, often uniting the visions and principles of Italian and Japanese art. During her sojourn in Japan, she executed a permanent installation, Umi-no-Kanat-he (1991), and received inspiration for her subsequent show ?Giappone-Italia? at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.

Dompe has shown awareness of the total language of space, understood as place, as well as a compulsion on her part to interact with it in dialectical terms. In the process, her work has evolved towards social commitment. An example of this was embodied by a 1993 creation in Rome, which was a denunciation of the horrors of war. In some ways, this work represents the culmination of her manifold endeavour to impose on the spectator an active sensorial participation.