In 1981, inspired by a Sardinian fairy tale about a girl saving her community from the collapse of a mountain following a blue ribbon, artist Maria Lai created an installation that involved all the inhabitants of her native village of Ulassai in Sardinia.
The project was also inspired by a request from the mayor of Ulassai who had asked her to create a war memorial to commemorate the fallen soldiers: Lai had refused explaining she would rather make a monument to the living.
Lai called the project "Legarsi alla montagna" (Tied to the Mountain): it consisted in a web of cloth strips that connected the houses leading up to the peak of the mountain overlooking the town.
In this way Lai and the community strengthened the physical bond between human beings and nature, while the knots and bows of the blue ribbons also symbolised the relationships between the families living in the town.
Lai's physical blue web is not too different from the global and invisible digital web that ties all of us nowadays, that's one of the many reasons why Maria Lai's works should be studied by a younger generation of people.
Many of us will get the chance to do so at the 57th Venice International Art Exhibition: several works by Maria Lai are indeed on display in the Arsenale and the section dedicated to her also includes a video of "Legarsi alla montagna", shot by Tonino Casula.
Born in 1919 in Ulassai, Sardinia, Maria Lai studied in Rome and then in Venice, before going back to Cagliari after the war.
Lai's early drawings revolved around portraits of relatives, friends and women at work; then she gradually moved onto landscapes populated with houses, shepherds and flocks.
In 1957 Lai exhibited at the Obelisk Gallery in Rome, she stopped exhibiting in 1961 and started again in 1971.
In the mid-to-late '60s Lai had indeed developed new pieces and created the "Telai" (Looms) - assemblages of wires, scraps of fabric, wood and everyday objects - artworks inspired by the primitive elements of Sardinian culture.
The artist kept on creating more pieces between the '80s and the '90s: by then fabrics and threads had become key elements of her practice and she employed them to build bridges between the past and the present, traditions and innovation, history and myth, artisanal and craft elements with conceptual art.
In more recent years Lai became a friend, muse and collaborator of Sardinian fashion designer Antonio Marras. In 1993 the artist moved back to Cardedu in Sardinia where she died twenty years later.
Most of her pieces show a strong link with childhood: for English poet William Wordsworth the child was the father of the man; for Lai all human beings are the heirs of the man who lost the earthly paradise because he had never been a child, and therefore we must spend our lives trying to play like children as much as we can to conquer back that blessed condition that we lost.
Bits and pieces of Maria Lai's songs "Il vento spegne le stelle" (The wind puts off the stars) and "Cammino sul fondo del mare" (I walk on the bottom of the sea), inspired by children's dreams, are printed on white sheets hanging from the ceiling of the Arsenale, reminding visitors of this strong link with childhood that Lai had.
Lai's works at the Arsenale are a sort of summary of thousands of years of traditions, poetry, culture, textile art and crafts. In this space visitors will find unfinished geographical maps and universal histories of the world rendered with abstract threads.
Threads in Lai's practice symbolise the possibility of exploring a space (a needle pierces a piece of fabric, it passes through it, travelling through it), but she also loved exploring materials as proved by her bread encyclopedia and by her notebooks and books made of fabric and integrating pieces of ceramic and paper.
Some of these books evoke in their textures the raw Sardinian landscape; others feature cryptic messages such as "The poets work in the dark".
Among the most powerful pieces there are the bed sheet and the altar cloth, as they contain a deep sense of mystery and magic, almost a sacred ritual. From a distance you may think that the thread decorating it forms proper words and intricate texts, but, when you get closer, you realise that Lai wrote on these pieces words that are unintelligible for all those people who can read and write.
They can instead be perfectly understood by those women who couldn't read nor write but who used the language of embroidery to express their thoughts, feelings and stories.
Once Lai stated indeed that when she saw her grandmother mending bedsheets, she imagined she was writing stories to tell to her grandchildren.
These threads symbolise therefore the solemn act of transferring a secret code of a lost language on fabric, creating in this way a visual symphony and a memory as well.
Maria Lai's works are displayed in the Pavilion of the Common section of the Arsenale, dedicated to artists who try to build active links and relations with their audiences.
Visitors passing through the Pavilion of the Common will be able to directly interact with other installations such as Lee Mingwei's and David Medalla's, while they will be able to ponder more about the final meaning of Lai's works: art should fill people's heart with joy and reactivate our minds.
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