Dama

Dama is part of a small group of works executed in varying scales in which Alighiero Boetti enshrined his love of systems within a game of his own invention. This work consists of 100 “playing” pieces ordered in a jigsaw-like grid. The blocks in the work compose a playful yet preordained set of dominoes. As in the Bollini (Stickers) series, the pieces of Dama fit together according to an internal logic; the symbols along the sides of each block have only one match. Despite the work’s apparent simplicity, there is only one way to arrange its pieces in the correct order. This visual simplicity but conceptual complexity allowed Boetti to explore the ideas of order and disorder.
Rules and variations are called into question in Dama. As Boetti explained, “I have worked much with the concept of order/disorder...by presenting apparent disorder which was, in fact, the depiction of intellectual order. The thing is to know the rules
of the game: he or she who does not know them will never recognize the order prevailing in things, just as someone who does not know the orders of the stars will always only see confusion, while an astronomer has a very clear view of things.”