Roberta Colombo’s home is a matri-environment; a field of possibilities, a nucleus of energy, a performative and affective habitat, a place—in perpetual transformation—of joyful coexistence and exchange.

It is a physical, psychic, and political entity; an inside and an outside, because, to paraphrase Khalil Gibran, if “the house is our larger body,” the body is our first and most intimate home.
It is a world in which art and design, private and relational, domestic and public, existential and political dimensions merge in the name of a need for expression that refuses any limit. This house is both a point of departure and arrival; from here, Roberta Colombo projects herself outward to explore and live the experiences that nourish her, to find the materials destined to be worked through a process that will transform them into artworks.
Her work tends to unfold in close relation with the domestic environment, yet it cannot be contained; in the past it has often expanded outward through interventions that escaped designated spaces to graft themselves onto the urban fabric.

Roberta’s home has nothing to do with the static, muffled, predictable environment of the traditionally understood home. Quite the opposite: it offers itself as an organism capable of containing, metabolizing, and re-signifying everything that crosses it; an uncontrollable organism in perpetual growth and evolution. Approaching it means giving up the urge to circumscribe, to demand measure, to draw boundaries of action or disciplinary confines. Attracted by the potentialities of all things in life, every object in her hands can acquire meaning, every action seems to convert into a message: her daily life and her work—which are one and the same—are animated by an inexhaustible capacity to generate meaning and relationships.
The element unifying this research is a reflection rooted in the political and cultural revolution of feminism. Driven by the intent to dismantle the patriarchal paradigm, Colombo looks at women in their multifaceted complexity, fully identifying the female body with sexuality and embodiment.

Her works may arise from autobiographical impulses—as in Diary, which addresses the restlessness of a transitional moment—or from wide-ranging themes, charged with implications: gender inequality, imposed binarism, the unspoken pressures, wrongs, and violence hidden in the domestic context, works that often rely on the demystifying function of irony. This is the case with the Violated Chairs and the Family Plates, whose “decorations” consist of a knife or a slap; with the Scepters of the Feminine, emblems of power mounted on broom handles and meant to be wielded by non-male hands; with the Domestic Weapons, eternal symbols of housewifery—from detergent bottles to ladles—transformed into joyful, combative weapons through which to reclaim a politically active role.
An old chest of drawers recovered from the street becomes emblematic of a freedom of feeling that women in the past were denied: engraved on its ceramic top is a text by Wislawa Szymborska beginning with: “Even today, the belief still reigns that women, unlike men, are housewives by nature. Indeed, for the most part they are. But is it ‘by nature’?” It is the Chest of Wislawa.

If with all her thought and work Roberta brings the political into play starting from what is most singular, exceptional, and unique—herself—in the large sculpture GODDESSINTHEDOORWAY the dimension she invokes is that of ritual, but also of care. In this case, she embodies the divinity in a totemic self-representation made, as she herself declares, “of imprints of my body, of my works, objects from the house, […].” The result is a hybrid and fragmented, metamorphic figure, a guardian and a protector, as specific as she is timeless, encompassing everything, including that trait which unites the human with all other living beings: vulnerability. The figure “is in unstable balance, like Jenga, so much so that some years ago she collapsed and was rebuilt so she could take part in the exhibition.”
Driven by an irrepressible expressive and communicative urgency, Roberta generates ideas and works at an incessant rhythm. In fact, this too is a form of subversion: a resistance to any reductionism, a way of continuously creating new scenarios while evading all control.

The vital exuberance of Dimora—with its numerous, assertive, rebellious, joyous yet never light works that populate the space and overflow beyond it—represents precisely a conscious assertion: nothing is excluded, nothing is eluded; engaging with what surrounds us is essential. Every object has the power to speak, and everything invites questioning. Here, one breathes a sense of welcome and wholeness. This is no small thing, accustomed as we are to living by rule and predictability.
And nothing is certain: no grid, no format exists; everything is overturned, starting with the very idea of the exhibition itself. For the artist, questioning home and making home are one and the same, and at Assab One not only her works but also Colombo’s furniture, books, household objects—and she herself—take up residence, if only temporarily. A real move.
The space is destined to be shared with anyone who wishes to take part in this new kind of home.