To tie - Maria Lai's tapes.

In a village called Ulassai,  set in the inside of Sardinia, every child is told about an ancient legend, generation by generation. It’s said that a long time ago (but probably this is a real story that happened in 1861) a house was overwhelmed by a landslip from the mountains around the village and three children died.  But a little girl survived and she brought  a light blue ribbon in her fingers.

In September the 8^th in 1988, le life of Ulassai was embraced by a light blue ribbon once more, this time not because of a tragedy,  but for being involved in an artwork.

Maria Lai

Maria Lai, who passed away last April the 16^th at the age of 93, was born in Ulassai, and even if she spent so many years between Venice, Rome and Cagliari, she found in her native village a solid focus and a source of inspiration. After her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and her teaching training in Cagliari, she discovered a very deep connection with the most ancient Sardinian traditions, during the Sixties, when she lived in Rome and her neighbor was the Sardinian writer Giuseppe Dessì.  
Then, she started to focus her studies on some traditional elements of Sardinia, like the tipical bread,  the use of loom, stories and legends. The closest one to Maria’s personality and concept is absolutely the loom. She interpretated it as the perfect media for women’s  communication and expression. 
The artist herself lived the worse years for womens’ emancipation, the Thirties and the Fourties in Italy, when the society was so male chauvinist and fascist that women could never be involved in the art field even if talented. Her first frustration was the collision – meeting with Alberto Viani, her sculpture teacher in Venice’s Academy of Fine Arts who never liked the idea of women involved in artistic intentions. The loom in Maria Lai’s hands became an important instrument for women’s expression, that used ribbons, fabric and tapes to build their stories and to tell while telling. The loom became the main charachter of her artistic production and she started to build her own handmade carpets and embroideries, until the collection of “Telai”, when this pieces of fabric became real sculptures.

"Telaio del meriggio" 1967. oil, wood, fabric.

Ribbons and fabric become the main characters of a great installation that invaded Ulassai in September the 8^th in 1988. Maria Lai was called to design a War Memorial, but she refused and she proposed another kind of artistic project that brought the village institutions into caos. She wanted tobuild a monument not for dead people but for the alive ones and she created another interpretation of the old legend of the village. So, she tied physically houses and people with alight blue tape, which was 27 km long. This idea was considered crazy at the beginning, because in every small community there are love connections, but also difficulties and matters between people, but this problem found a great solution too. 
The people was involved in cutting a very big piece of fabric until obtaining many long tapes, and then they had to embrace and run them all around the village, all around houses and the mountains, putting a knot where there was affection between neighbours, and just turning around the corner where there was any conflicts. In some points, where there was a big matter of love and affection they use to put a piece of the tipical bread in the village, called “Pani pintau”. 
In this way the village could express itself becouse of a gesture of its own people.  In that occasion women, children, old and young people worked together to celebrate their own village and to express its vitality, and then becoming a whole one with those rocks that so many times brought death and disaster in, but that are also part of it.

"Legarsi alla montagna" 1988, Ulassai.

For so many years this performance was not appreciated by the national critics, and Maria Lai was accused of just inventing a celebration for the village. But in the last years this new concept of contemporary land art has been enhanced, and “Legarsi alla montagna” has been interpretated as an experiment of artistic performance where the user is also the author of the artwork itself. So now it is considered a very original step ahead on contemporary art.

Actually this performance in Ulassai meant also a big change in the village’s life, that became a open museum under the sky, and in 2006 Maria Lai decided to build a contemporary art centre called Stazione dell’arte – Ulassai, that looks after many of the artist’s artworks.

In April the 13^th one of the biggest Italian artists passed away and with her also the most sensitive one in sardinian artistic field.  She has been a deep medium between Sardinian ancient tradition and the most openminded international art concept. But in Sardinia she will be remembered most as that little woman who could pick up the beauty of this island turning it in immortal poetry.