Made in an edition of 500, twelve artists’ proofs and nine custom-built pieces, this multiple work was first presented at the Centro Multipli di Roma, along with the drawing/design of the same name, and an enlargement of the photograph on the work’s label. The multiple consists of a linen-paper envelope with the logo and graphics of a fictitious airline (‘Airways’), simulating a vomit bag provided to passengers. Inside the envelope, a few grains of rice or dried pasta stars are encased in a green, blue or reddish-coloured fibreglass tablet, slightly different in each case. On a tablet protruding a couple of inches from the envelope, a paper band bears the words: ‘Vomited by Fabio Mauri at 9500 m alt. over Piraeus. 21 January 1972.’ The Centro Multipli di Roma’s logo features on the back of the band. On the back of each tablet, a white inscription in the upper centre specifies in transfer lettering ‘multiplo politico’ (political multiple), accompanied in the lower right by a signature and edition number. Each bag came with a label and the inscription ‘vera foto di Fabio Mauri al ritorno dalla missione in Grecia’ (real photo of Fabio Mauri returning from his mission to Greece) (inv. 1071), ‘emissione del 21.1.1972 / brief: vomitare sulla grecia’ (issued 1/21/1972 / brief: vomiting on Greece). The Greece to which Mauri referred was a dictatorship run by colonels who had seized power in a 1967 coup d’état, abolishing civil rights and freedoms, and perpetrating political arrests and torture. The artist expressed his position against the illiberal regime through an imagined action, ‘documented’ in all its stages and disseminated through an artistic multiple that, ‘through a drastic moral imperative’, asserted ‘the horror of social-political conduct of a Fascist nature’.1

1. S.G., ‘Una nuova proposta espressivo-comportamentale’, in Avanti!, 23 July, 1972, also published in F. Mauri, Der Politische Ventilator, no. 1, (Milan: Achille Mauri – Krachmalnicoff, 1973), p. 73.