In the exhibition by Adele Prosdocimi and the accompanying book, emotional layering is the key to interpreting the symbols that have shaped faiths and the desire to believe in them. Between the book and the exhibition, an invisible mirror reflects one to the other: the images of her works and of herself alternate, page by page, with words from beloved masters, floor plans of buildings representing the history of public and religious architecture, photographic notes, and her hands carving, but also—and not by chance, it is the opening of the book—the portrait of “Lia, queen of the harmony of doing.” The personal emotional sedimentation, placed on the first page, guides us through the passions for words and the work of others that Adele Prosdocimi condenses in this book, where she connects her biography and her search for subjective stories to the symbols of the faiths that have united and opposed men, women, ideas, emotions, rules, and struggles.

In the exhibition, the walls of her fragile pentagonal architecture are made of white paper, on which she has impressed the Star of David, the Islamic crescent, the Christian cross, the hammer and sickle, and the spiral—figures that connect and set the other elements in motion, creating a structure based on instability, emphasized by the bulges left in the paper by the light weight of the clay. In another installation, the artist takes us back to the origins through large columns covered in paper, where the symbols intertwine and overlap in a narrative register where each one retains its own distinctiveness. She does the same through carving and embroidery, with which she creates images of these archetypes. Using manual techniques tied to the intimate and domestic dimension, she firmly and autonomously redeems the female subordination trapped in craftsmanship.