‘Dieser Koffer ist arisch’, is etched by fire onto the leather edge of a cardboard suitcase in Gothic script. Mauri introduced the theme of the ideologically connoted object in the late 1980s. He subsequently developed it in the 1995 ‘Arierwiege’ exhibition-installation (inv. 1023), consisting of works-objects ‘bearing witness to the traditional membership of a community that consumed its prejudices’, in which each accessory, labelled ‘Aryan’, ‘aspires to evoke the ambiguous design of an ideology.’1 Different in form but conceptually identical, the work shares this same title with other suitcases (inv. 597, 599, 622, 625).

1. F. Mauri, ‘De Chirico spiato’, in Giorgio De Chirico: Nulla sine tragoedia gloria. Atti del Convegno Europeo di Studi, edited by C. Crescentini, m&m – maschietto e musolino, Florence, 2002, p. 305.