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| Armed |
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| Armed 2 |
In Armed and Armed 2, Adamo Macri turns his attention to one of the oldest technologies of the body: the suit of armour. Tin-metal medieval knights, helmets, and shields become more than historical objects; they are proxy bodies, hollow shells that once promised protection, honour, and violent power. Within the larger arc of Macri’s practice—so often preoccupied with vulnerability, contamination, and hybrid flesh—these works read as a pointed inquiry into what it means to shield the self and, equally, what gets sacrificed when we do.
The visual language of knights and suits of armour arrives heavy with cultural residue: chivalry, warfare, spectacle, masculinity, and the pageantry of power. Macri treats this armour almost as a second skin, exposing its theatricality and its emptiness. The metal surfaces, helmets, and shields evoke a body prepared for battle, yet what they hide is conspicuously absent. We are left to imagine the missing figure—soft, exposed, mortal—once encased within these rigid forms. In this way, Armed and Armed 2 echo his ongoing fascination with shells, casings, and containers, from cocoons to sculptural vessels that both conceal and reveal.
At the same time, the title “Armed” plays with multiple registers: to be armed with weapons, armed with defence, armed with identity. The suit of armour becomes a metaphor for the psychological and social armouring that individuals perform—especially in a world of constant exposure and scrutiny. If other works in Macri’s oeuvre focus on the porous, contaminated, and transforming body, these pieces contemplate the fantasy of sealed borders: the dream that one could build a perfect, impenetrable shell around the self. Yet the very presence of these empty armours hints at failure. Armour is always an admission of fear as much as it is a display of strength.
There is also a subtle dialogue here with art history and museum culture. Suits of armour and knightly regalia are common in historical collections, presented as relics of noble pasts. Macri’s engagement with this imagery feels less nostalgic than forensic. The helmet and shield—symbols of protection and aggression—are examined not as heroic artifacts, but as evidence of how societies ritualize violence and codify power into objects. In pairing Armed with Armed 2, he suggests that this is not a single, isolated image but a small constellation of states: variations on how the body negotiates danger, how it dresses for conflict, how it disappears behind its instruments.
Against the backdrop of his broader practice—where hybrid creatures, metamorphic forms, and contaminated surfaces abound—these works introduce a stark, almost architectural counterpoint. They ask a quietly unsettling question: what happens to transformation when you lock yourself into a fixed shell? The knight’s armour, with its strict contours and rigid plates, stands in tension with Macri’s usual fluid, mutating bodies. In that tension, Armed and Armed 2 open up a space to think about defence and exposure, strength and fragility, and the complex, often contradictory ways we construct our own protective myths.
Armed, 2016
66 x 66 cm
Overall: 77 x 77 x 4 cm
Edition: 4
Armed 2, 2016
41 x 41 cm
Overall: 51 x 51 x 4 cm
Edition: 4
Photography: Chromogenic C-print
