L’Alfabeto della mente, Lettera 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-9-10-11-12-13,

1979

Dadamaino created this series in response to a months-long siege in 1976 of the Palestinian refugee camp of Tel al-Zaatar in Lebanon by Lebanese Christian militias and the eventual massacre of the camp’s Palestinian residents. As she read about the siege day after day, the artist’s outrage compelled her to inscribe repeating patterns of lines across sheets of paper. She understood this mark making—creating patterns that resemble letters written in an unknown script of an imagined language—as a recognition of the insufficiency of writing to convey her emotional response to this tragic event: “Full of anger and powerless pain, I felt an impulse to draw signs take hold of me. I did not allow myself to do anything else. I obsessively made horizontal and vertical lines.”