Maria Lai. Art and connection

MARIA LAI Elena Pontiggia

Art and connection

MARIA LAI Elena Pontiggia

Art and connection

This volume was realized with the essential collaboration of the Maria Lai Archive. In particular, thanks to the President Maria Sofia Pisu, the Director Eva Borzoni and the Curator Chiara Manca for their constant advice and help in the iconographic research.

Editorial coordination Anna Pau Design and layout Ilisso Editions Printing Lito Terrazzi English translation Roberto Bertagnin Thanks to: Civic Museum of Cagliari, MAN of Nuoro, MUSMA of Matera, MART of Rovereto, The Sardinia Foundation, President of the Regional Council of Sardinia, The Giuseppe Dessì Foundation, Museum of Oil of Castelnuovo di Farfa, MEOC Museum of Weaving of Aggius, National Association of Mutilated and War Invalids of Cagliari, Fueddu e Gestu Theater Company, Ercole Bartoli Foundation for Contemporary Art of Cagliari, Gallerie d’Italia (Intesa San Paolo) of Milan, Olnick Spanu Collection of New York, Augusta Porciani, director of the Library Archive of the Rome Quadriennale, Sveva Di Martino (Studio Spazi Consonanti Architettura), Maria Teresa Mura, Massimo Duranti, Giovanna Tamassia, Ille Strazza, Guido Strazza, Simonetta Gorreri, Giuliana Carbi, Stefania Miscetti, Giampietro Orrù, Giovanni Locci, Diego Viapiana, Gianni Polinas, Mario Saragato, Pierluigi Dessì, Giorgio Dettori, Maria Giuseppina Cuccu, Gianfranco Canneddu, Gino Frogheri, Michele Barba, Maria Rosaria Guarini, Egidio e Giuliana Chillotti, Linda Puddu, Massimo Lai and Tiziana Tascedda, Elisabetta Pisu, Walter Baldi, Giovanna Puddu Crespellani, Giovanna, Maria and Margherita Crespellani, Giulio Lai, Ernesto Porcari, Angela Colomo, Pasquale Merlini, Stefano De Montis, Francesca Cataldi, Luisa Picozzi, Francesco Proia, Mila Dau, Franca Sonnino, Nina e Antonio Salvatore.

A particular thank you goes to all the collectors, who have greatly helped and contributed to the realization of this volume.

Photographic credits: Unless otherwise specified in the captions, the photos have been taken specifically for this volume by Pietro Paolo Pinna, and they are part of the Ilisso Editions Archive, with exception of nn. 67, 102, 108–112, photos by Richard Max Tremblay; nn. 50, 124, Archive of the Civic Museum of Cagliari; nn. 90, 150, 286 MAN Archive, Nuoro; nn. 280, 284–285, 430, 438, Olnick Spanu Collection Archive, New York; n. 407, MUSMA Archive, Matera; n. 291, Gallerie d’Italia (Intesa San Paolo), Milan.

The publisher declares itself available to regulate any omission due for those images for which the source was not available.

Any further reproduction is prohibited.

© 2017 ILISSO EDIZIONI - Nuoro www.ilisso.it ISBN 978-88-6202-357-3

Index

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Introduction

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The beginnings

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The second Roman period.

From the show at the Obelisco to the birth of the Looms

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Material and immaterial.

The Seventies: Sewn Canvases, Breads, Books

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Art and connection.

Tying oneself to the mountain

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The Eighties.

Among collective activities, theater, and fairy tales

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Maria Pietra and reflections on art

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Between the millennia.

From The Museum of Oil to The house of fears

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To Be is to Weave and beyond.

A stronger presence

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Anthology.

Writings by Maria Lai

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Essenzial bibliography

Introduction

“Realize that your world contains the entire world,” says an Asian proverb. Something similar is felt in Maria Lai’s work. Her world of looms, fabrics, and holiday bread is an expression of a millennial Sardinia, that has happily intersected with the world of contemporary art and Conceptual art in particular. It is a reality always confirmed by the many critics who have been reflecting on her work over the last few years, and it is an indisputable fact, especially if we understand exactly its proportions, as the proverb invites us to do.

Let us explain it better. In 1967, Maria Lai realized Oggetto-paesaggio (Object-Landscape). It is a composition that evokes the structure of a loom, even if it cannot work, and is almost a symbol of Sardinian civilization, which has led handcrafts to an unreachable wisdom. The use of non-canonical materials, however, goes hand in hand with Pascali’s works and is naturally implemented in the environment of that Conceptual art, originated from everyday objects, which at that time included different variations, from New Realism to Arte Povera.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Maria Lai made her first Tele cucite (Sewn Canvases), replacing the brushes with thread. She did not paint anymore, she sewed. She recalled that wisdom of the needle

that on the Island has been expressed for centuries in the weaving and embroideries of garments, rugs, and objects, even though she represented it in a simple way, without ornaments. At the same time, however, her works merge with that extra-pictorial search that from Burri to Scarpitta, from Fontana to Manzoni, does not aim at painting the canvas, but rather at painting with the canvas, treating it not as a tool but as the raw material of its compositions.

Again, in the second half of the 1970s, the artist created a series of bread sculptures. She did not forget about the doughs made of flour and semolina she had seen as a little girl when, on the eve of the holidays, the women were preparing white bread, garnished and carved as jewels, displayed on the family table. Her bread is more of an everyday bread, with earthy and opaque tones, without fancy decorations. Her works, however, are compared to Manzoni’s michette [Italian white bread], to the food used by New Realism, and to the search for new materials of Arte Povera.

Likewise, at the end of the decade, she sewed on pages made of canvas a writing composed of indecipherable signs and tangles, which she would gather in her Libri (Books). Her Pagine (Pages) still enclose the echoes of old housework, that of linens mended

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by her grandmother in the house of Gairo, yet they also relate to the latest examples of Visual Poetry and of artists’ books.

Looms, bread, threads, seams: Maria Lai’s art is a return trip between Sardinia and Europe, between the particulare [individual interest] and the universal. It must be noted, however, that if the great contains the small, in her case the great is not the world itself but her world; it is not the international scene but the horizon of her land, with its legends, its songs, its poetry, its art, and its culture. Maria Lai, consequently, moved from the great universe of the Island (great because it is millenarian, accustomed to measuring timeless time and living with the memories of epochs that existed before writing and history. Great also because in Sardinia, Abstract art was born many centuries before Kandinsky, already with Nur’s fabrics; also Polymateric art was born many centuries before the avant-garde, with an artistic handicraft pervading everyday life). Maria Lai, therefore, moved from the great universe of the Island to understand the small universe of her contemporary West. Precisely the legacy of her world, coupled with her talent so extraordinarily capable of empathy, gives to her works that particular warmth, that unique humanity, that ca-

dence of legend and fairy tale that is part of their unrepeatable nature. It is indeed the richness of her world, which gives her Conceptualism a lyrical dimension, full of memories and myth, distinguishing it from the results of her fellow artists.

Often the legacy of the past, mixed with the living experience of the present, introduces us more easily to the future. For this reason, in Legarsi alla montagna (Tying Oneself to the Mountain, 1981), Maria Lai, moving from a legend passed down for centuries, had been able to anticipate of almost two decades (a huge time span in the impetuous contemporary art scene) what Nicolas

1-5. Maria Lai’s house on Via Prisciano 75, Rome, 1991. The photos, taken just before her return to Sardinia, show some of the works that Maria Lai kept at home; Nowadays, some of these are part of public collections. In the bedroom there are photos of her parents and of the house in Cardedu, taken by Marianne Sin-Pfältzer, a famous German photographer friend of her. Finally, in the living room are displayed the works of the artists closer to her, including Nivola, Strazza, Bentivoglio, Gut and Casula.

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Bourriaud called in 1998 Relational Aesthetics. An art form that does not express itself in objects but in relationships, which does not produce paintings and sculptures but links, though momentary and destined to vanish. In Legarsi alla montagna (Tying Oneself to the Mountain), the first experience of Relational art in Italy, Maria Lai had all the inhabitants of Ulassai, where she was born, tying their houses to one another with a ribbon and then tying them up to the mountain behind the town. In conclusion, she turned upside down the relationship between the artist and the observer, making people the real author of the artwork. It is a different way of conceiving and composing art that does not eliminate the standard one; just as the invention of the cinema did not eliminate the theater, rather they approached and merged.

With her lyrically Conceptual language, with her Looms, her threads, her Books, her Breads, what did the artist want to say?

There is a main theme in Maria Lai’s search, who stated, “You start to understand art exactly when you don’t comprehend it.”

Yet she never refused to talk about the symbols enclosed in her work. As she herself said, “Art develops from matter to idea. An idea that did not exist before the work itself.” What idea does her work reveal?1 The artist from Ulassai was, in spite of appearances, what the French call peintre-philosophe. She belongs to that category of artists for whom visual research coincides with the expression of a dense core of thought. Of course, she had an approachable attitude, which could even be understood by a child, as in the case of fairy tales. It is never a theorem to be proven, but rather a thought in progress, open to mystery and to how much of that mystery is revealed in the development of her work. However, it is a deep and organic mindset that mainly focuses on two concepts, rather on two experiences: relationship and art. Where one is nothing but an aspect of the other, because, as she herself said, “This is what art should do: make us feel more united, without this we are not human beings.”2 In order to better understand the core of these meanings, we can recall very briefly her path, which we will be able to better analyze later on. After a childhood she defined as “wild” (until 9 or 10 years of age she had not learned to write yet), but already marked by a pictorial and fantastic vocation, in junior high school Maria had as a teacher the writer Salvatore Cambosu, to whom she owes the first fundamental lessons: love for poetry and sensitivity for rhythm.

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In 1933, when she was just 14 years old, she had the opportunity to be the model for the important sculptor Francesco Ciusa. She returned to his studio one year later, with the support of her school, to learn the rudiments of sculpting. Her first works, now lost, won the first prize at the Lictorials of Art in Rome, in 1935.

After struggling to obtain her father’s permission to enroll in the art high school of the capital, Maria started studying with Mazzacurati from 1939, then at the peak of his sculptural period. In 1943, she moved to Venice where she attended the lessons of Arturo Martini (a teaching that she would fully comprehend only twenty or thirty years later) and Alberto Viani. She returned to Sardinia at the end of the War and, thanks to the encouragement of Cambosu, she overcame a moment of painful expressive crisis.

She started drawing and carving again in the ways of Lyrical Realism, characterized by a resolute geometrical synthesis.

In 1956, she returned to Rome where, after a brief Informalist and Polymateric period (and a long pause from exhibitions), between the late 1960s and the next decade with her Looms, Sewn Canvases, Breads, Writings, Books, and Geography (imaginary astral maps, sewn on cloth) she approached from one side Burri, and on the other Conceptual art and Visual Poetry.

After Tying Oneself to the Mountain, her masterpiece, she realized other collective events (Villasimius, 1982; Camerino, 1983; Oro-

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telli, 1984), supported by theater activities and workshops, animated by the same desire for collective involvement. Meanwhile, she continued working on her Books (which from 1984 started to change their appearance to Fairy Tales), her Looms, her Writings, and her Geography.

Also in the following two decades, she created relational events (The Bitter Honey Tree, Siliqua, 1997; To Be is to Weave, Aggius, 2008) together with public art interventions (Ulassai, 1992– 2005; Sinnai, 1999; Castelnuovo di Farfa 1999–2001; Osini, 2004) and the creation of collective games aimed at understanding art mechanisms. The written word became the protagonist of many of her works, beginning with the series of Trees (The Poet’s Tree, The Museum of Oil, Castelnuovo di Farfa, 1999). She also tested herself realizing monumental sculptures focused on the theme of the line, on the wire translated into metal (Monument to Gramsci, 2007; Wind Loom, 2007; The Capture of the Wind’s Wing, 2009).

As we can see from this little information, after an initial period that took her from Lyrical Realism to Informalism, Maria Lai focused on the theme of bonding. Her Looms, her Sewn Canvases hint at the act of joining, connecting, tying together. What matters to her is not the decoration on the canvas, despite the superb tradition behind it. What matters is to keep together the different shapes, the different extensions, the different individualities of the textile.

The same concept inspired Tying Oneself to the Mountain, planned on building a bond between men, and between men and nature in a momentum of solidarity, rather of Schopenhauerian compassion. “There is nothing more necessary for a man than man himself,” said Spinoza; Maria moved from an identical consciousness: without sentimentalism, without utopian illusions (the same life that took away her brother by violent death, was then in charge of curing her from a naive way of seeing things), yet with a rare sense of confidence and hope in the expressive research of the 20th century.

Art, therefore, can create ties. Maria Lai’s intent was not only to make people part of the event but also co-authors of it. Her work is not individual and intimate, but archaically choral, such as popular tales or the Greek choir, and it necessarily involves being together.

But not only that, in Tying Oneself to the Mountain, the ribbon that tied together the houses was inspired by an ancient local legend in which a little girl was chasing it under a fierce storm, abandoning the cave where she took shelter. Her gesture apparently senseless, avoided her death, protecting her from the landslide that had flooded the cave. Tying Oneself to the Mountain, therefore, introduces the theme of art as a possibility of salvation.

Maria, from that moment on, began an inquiry into artistic language, not in a theoretical and abstract manner, but rather through a celebration, a game, a theatrical performance involving children and adults. She thought that everyone should get close to art, not to follow an aesthetic ideal, but to truly be themselves.

As she would say years later, quoting Gramsci: “It is the one who is walking down the street that should conquer culture.”3 Her idea of art, furthermore, was absolutely feminine. In her opinion, the artist’s paradigm is Maria Pietra: she is the main character of a legend told by Cambosu, who inspired many of her works. Maria Pietra is a woman who uses forbidden magical powers for the love of her sick child. As a consequence, a terrible punishment is imposed on her (to be turned into stone) that she accepts in return to get her son’s life back. For Cambosu, and according to the legend, that is the symbol of motherly love; for

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Maria Lai is instead the emblem of artistic creativity, and the metamorphosis she undergoes, gives her eternity.

If Maria Pietra is the artist par excellence, artists are also the Janas (fairies created by a divine spark, who teach the art of loom to the Sardinian women) and the women of the Island, who from weaving give birth to alphabet and poetry. Lai narrated their story in the fairy tales La leggenda del Sardus Pater (The Legend of Sardus Pater) and Il dio distratto (The Inattentive God, 1990), inspired from a tale by her friend Giuseppe Dessì, and in Ca’ de Janas (1996). The apparently idle bee, main character of the tale Curiosape (1991), is also considered an artist, able to investigate the meaning of things. Maria without resorting to sociology but to legend and myth, overthrew the common mentality of that time, according to which art was not a thing for women, showing instead that the kingdom of art is ruled by queens.

But what is art then? It is an artifice, a deception, as she had already proven in 1979 in Selargius, when she “sewed” metallic signs on the wall of a house, letting a length of thread hanging from it, as if she had really sewn it. Art, however, is also the highest expression of man. It overcomes primitive and negative instincts, it helps to cope with the anxieties and life dramas, as revealed by the interactive activity in Camerino (1983), set on the remains of large reptiles. It is the nourishment of the soul, as shown in the collective performance L’alveare del poeta (The Poet’s Beehive) at Orotelli in 1984. Certainly art is a fragile instrument, a paper vessel that crosses the seas of mystery, as shown in the installation Su barca di carta m’imbarco (Sailing on a Paper Boat, 1993), and in her book La barca di carta (The Paper Boat, 1996).

Art is certainly a language that needs to be studied with patience, with the humility of children who want to learn how to write, as the installation Il tempo dell’arte (The Time of Art, 1996) teaches us. Art may also strike fear in the artist, as in Come Daphne impaurita (As a Frightened Daphne, 1999). Yet it may be represented as a game, a sort of game for adults. Maria Lai tried to explain

this in a playful way, depicting decks of cards (Art Places at your Fingertips, 2001) and board games (The Flight of the Game of the Goose, 2002–04);4 a recreational way to approach people to expressive procedures.

Through its own spells, Art Leads Us by the Hand, as in the title of a work by Maria from 2003, and leads us to infinity. This last concept, which is constantly present in the works and reflections of Maria in her last decades, does not coincide in a romantic and Leopardian way with a sweet sinking in the sea of existence, or with a mystical loss of memory. On the contrary, it coincides with the conquest, so to speak, of our humanity. “Our relationship with infinity is essential to be human,” the artist repeated.5 Her last interactive event, Essere è tessere (To Be is to Weave, 2008), was an extreme equation between existence, relationship, and art, which condensed all of her ideals. Existing means weaving a pattern of relationships, but since weaving is a form of art, it also means having experience with poetry, moving toward infinity. It is an experience, or a game, which is the opposite of the ivory towers of Aestheticism, because everyone can take part in it.

A tension toward the absolute is also hinted at in the great triangle facing the sky that appears in the Monument to Grazia Deledda (2012), the work with which Maria Lai closed her expressive path. Letting be led by art, in short, is not a privilege for just a few. The invitation to the journey of poetry has no limited seats.

With this concept the poetess of the thread departed, leaving us an Ariadne’s thread that will never stop helping us find our way out of the labyrinth of our fears, Hand in Hand with the Sun.

6. Maria Lai working on the assembling of The Ceiling-Loom at the wash-house in Ulassai, 1982.

7. Setup of the exhibition Inventing other Spaces, Rome, Scuderie di Palazzo Ruspoli, March 1994.

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To Be is to Weave and beyond.

A stronger presence

In 2008, close to the age of 90, Maria Lai gave birth to Essere è tessere (To Be is to Weave) in Aggius (Sassari), her last collective event, almost her spiritual will.

The environmental performance in the small town of the Gallura region, known for its rugs woven using ancient methods and natural materials, has an articulated story and, to describe it, we must step backwards. In 2005, the artist was invited by Maria Teresa Mura, president of MEOC, an interesting and rich ethnographic museum in Aggius, to perform a work. Maria realized Un mondo di trame (A World of Textures) and a Loom, adding to it a portion of the local woven fabric. At the end of May 2006, she also held an exhibition at the local museum and since April, she had worked alongside the artisans of the town, adding to her works small sections of their beautiful carpets, which she herself defined as “precious stones.”183 She thus created a series of oneiric looms: boxes covered with a veil of threads, like windows shielded by transparent curtains, on the bottom of which are textile remnants, figures, and spots. She called them Telai-teatrini (Loom-Theaters), the same name (Teatrini) with which Melotti named his magic boxes (fig. 429). In other works, such as Cartigli (The Scrolls), she wrote instead short poems inspired by weaving (“I heard / the sound / of a loom / and the town / no longer / looked / dead”). “It is a propitious environment … at the same time relaxed and exciting, that stimulates creativity. I didn’t expect to produce so many works in just a few days,” she declared about her stay in town. As Maria Teresa Mura remembered, “At that time, Maria Lai began to visit the houses of the town, meeting with the locals. Aggius loved that little woman dressed in black, who talked of art with such simplicity, as if it was a part of her everyday life.”184 The year 2006 was a busy time for Maria, who did not seem to feel the passing of time. In February, she realized at the library of Carbonia the installation Dammi voce perché io possa volare con il vento verso le stelle (Presa per mano da Garcia Lorca) (Give Me Voice, so that I Can Fly with the Wind to the Stars, Hand in Hand with Garcia Lorca). A great composition of pages and books, inspired again by a verse of Spring by the Spanish poet, in the use of that “give me voice” that sounds like an outcry.

On July 8, not even two months after the Aggius exhibition, she finally completed a project that she had been cultivating for years: La Stazione dell’arte opened in Ulassai. A museum entirely dedicated to her work, with about one hundred and forty works donated by the artist, documenting her lifetime search. It is called “The Art Station” because of its location in the old local railroad station, which once connected Osini to Arbatax. In addition to being a permanent retrospective exhibition on Maria Lai, the museum organizes international seminars, cultural exchanges with Japanese and American students, and various exhibits. One of the first ones took place in December 2006, in partnership with Antonio Marras. Lai exhibited her Presepi (Nativity Scenes), while the designer invented the “Shepherd’s clothes”: old prisoner jackets, cut and sown back in the shape of cloaks. “Everybody wanted to try on these cloaks. The most extraordinary thing was to see Maria, this little being with white hair, wrapped in a large cloak and surrounded by them,” remembered Marras.185 At the end of 2007, on the lawn surrounding the museum, Lai installed the Monumento a Gramsci. Fiabe intrecciate (Monument to Gramsci. Interwoven Fairy Tales), dedicated to the political man on the 70th anniversary of his demise. Actually, hers is an antimonument that draws on the concept of sculpture as a drawing in the air (i.e., as a volume-free line in space), theorized by Picasso, Calder, and Melotti. It consists of the rough outline of a 324

mountain made up of metal lines, on which some mice are running; on the ground, from a book placed on a sort of stone stand, rises to the top a ribbon picked by a little girl, a reminiscence of Tying oneself to the mountain. The work, as the title reads, interlaces the legend with a tale written by Gramsci while he was in jail, dedicated to his son Delio. The protagonist of the story is a mouse that by mistake drinks the milk of a newborn and tries in vain, through many vicissitudes, to bring back a bowl of it. He finally receives help from a heavily deforested mountain, upon the promise that the baby one day will restore its green mantle, planting pines, firs, and chestnuts trees. “What really impressed me of the Letters by Gramsci, was that he had written stories that he proposed as legends to his faraway children,” Maria confessed.

And also, “I am the mouse, the mountain is Ulassai, to which I want to be bound, together with all those who love freedom, just thinking about Gramsci.”186 The sculpture was cast by the artisans of the Casa del Ferro in Ulassai: a collaboration highly appreciated by the artist, who found great teamwork in the execution, and that relationship between art and crafts that she had always aspired to. “With this work we are going back, or rather, we have already returned to the Middle Ages, when the artwork was made by the artisans in close contact with the authors. Art originates from the knowledge of the artisans. … The people who realized the [Basilica] of Sant’Ambrogio were artisans or artists? And those who erected San Nicola in Ottana or San Pietro in Sorres? Both, because there is no distinction. One does not exist without the other. I wouldn’t have ever realized the Gramsci monument all alone, I wouldn’t have had such adaptable manual skills. I made it with my friends, with the blacksmiths of my town. And this is the choral, engaging, and collective sense of art. In Ulassai, the medieval miracle of the homo faber happened and was repeated.”187 A few months later, on May 10, 2008, she opened the exhibition Al gigante lassù (To the Giant up There) in Orani, a tribute to Costantino Nivola on the 20th anniversary of his passing. “I consider Nivola as one of my great masters. I was destined to come across him so that I could renew, with greater clarity, my consciousness about what I meant as art.” This was her statement after she recalled the occasion when in 1973 she first saw Lettini (Little beds) by Nivola.188 She also dedicated him the work that gives the title to the exhibition: another drawing in the air, a large metal Loom based, as the Monument to Gramsci, on interwoven lines.

By then, newspapers considered Maria “the greatest Sardinian artist,” a definition she never aspired to and that actually, she does not care about. “How do we know if we are artists? Who told us? Only the future will tell,” she observed. And when they asked her to talk about her Art Places, she answered: “It’s one of my works. I don’t call it a work of art because we never know if that’s art. If the work succeeds in starting a conversation, then the work talks, otherwise it will remain silent.” This is one of the many similar statements she made on the topic.189

On the previous double-page spread: 428. Loom, 2008, Aggius.

In June 2008, thirteen Looms (fourteen with the one installed in the town hall) are placed in Aggius. Made of plastic and painted iron, designed by Maria Lai and realized in collaboration with local artisans. Plastic panels, used as backgrounds for the looms, are all of different colors.

429. Small Theater (Suighi), 2006, polymateric, 85 x 65.5 x 6.5 cm.

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This was the climate, therefore, in which the environmental performance Essere è tessere. La tessitura dà spettacolo (To Be is to Weave. The Weaving Put on a Show) in Aggius originated (figs.

432–433). As in Ulassai, the artist discarded the initial proposal (a show-contest) and, in a meeting with Maria Teresa Mura and Pietrino Soddu,190 she suggested a new environmental event. She wanted to attempt, for one last time, to have a collective event.

“I’m not interested in making a painting to hang, rather I want to leave a sign,” she said.191 Aggius seemed to be the most suit-

430. Project for Warp and Weft, 2004, polymateric, 123 x 62 x 5 cm, courtesy of Olnick Spanu Collection, New York.

431. Su dolu, 2007, polymateric, 77 x 55 x 5 cm.

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able place, both for the still vivid tradition of weaving, and for the hospitality of the people. Essere è tessere (To Be is to Weave) became a statement of poetics and at the same time, a philosophical axiom: there is no work of art that is not a weaving of relationships; as there is no existence that is not a creation of bonds, and there is no knowledge that is not a construction of logical and intellectual connections. Weaving, therefore, is a metaphor of man’s culture and history.

Introduced by meetings and conferences, in order to make it comprehensible and to involve the whole town, the event took place on July 26, 2008. Already two months earlier, Maria had installed thirteen Looms on the façade of the houses located in the old town: intersections of geometric lines, similar to drawings by Vantongerloo, but also to Japanese architectures (a reference validated also by the trip she made in December 2005 for the Barbagia meet Tokyo project, when despite her 86 years of age, she visited Tokyo and Hokkaido). Her other works, then, as flocks of goats, letters of the alphabet, and tapestries, were disseminated in the museum, in the town hall, and in the streets of the town (fig. 428).

At the beginning of the event, the video Tying oneself to the mountain by Tonino Casula was projected, in order to establish an ideal connection with the relational work of twenty-five years earlier. The event then continued along ten “stations” veiled of symbolic meanings, combined with music and dances, with Maria’s texts read by the Polish actress Marta Gabriel, and above all with works, writing, and drawings by the artist.

We summarize here the main moments of the event, so to speak its framework, trying not to end up in descriptive pedantry for what has been a page of shared life and celebration, though loaded with lyrical accents and philosophical meanings. “Aggius today becomes a ribbon, a pebble, a piece of cloth, which I want to give out, so that it could open the possibility of a dream and a game,” declared the artist with simplicity.192 At Alvinu Square, Il volo del gioco dell’oca (The Flight of the Game of the Goose) was drawn on the ground, alluding to stuttering, and to a complete lack of language. A little below the square, Libri di pane (Bread Books) were placed on a long table, representing a metaphor of knowledge. The protagonists of this part of the event were the children. An angel and a Fairy with Turquoise Hair, symbol of art, led them to the great chessboard of the Flight, where they played and sang the nursery rhyme of the goose. At another station, they sang a lullaby accompanied by the sound of the looms, while not far away a girl was singing a “corsicana” cantu a chiterra on the steps of an old house. Further on, the French actor Michel Rocher read on a balcony The Song of Myself by Walt Whitman, which is a Pantheistic anthem to Vitalism and to the unity of mankind (“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you … all the men ever born are also my brothers …

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier”). The last station, adorned with tapestries, puppetry and with the books of Curiosape and Pastorello con capretta (The Young Shepherd with Goat), was dedicated to fairy tales, which just like poetry, are symbols of the fullness of communicating. The itinerary, therefore, would take one from stuttering, to learn the full meaning of the artistic language.

The path for children, was the counterpoint of the women’s, which was positioned in another corner of the town, next to the image of Gregge di caprette (Flock of Young Goats). The women taught children the art of spinning, while close by, snowflakes made of wool were dropped from a balcony. A group of weavers then showed the importance of the warp that, with its strict

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interweaving, was also a reference to the rigor of art. The itinerary ended with the reading of A Passage to the India by Whitman, which indicates in the poet “the true child of God,” the emblem of civilization and harmony between man and nature.

Beyond the emphasis that distinguished the American writer, the metaphor is clear: life as a texture of relationships, comes with art to its fullest expression. “I have a dream: have all people understand art, especially contemporary art, often difficult to interpret. Because art must be for everyone,” declared Lai the day before the environmental event.193 Utopia? In any case, as those who were there recall, the town identified itself to the collective performance, in which they took part as a unity.

Two months after Aggius, Maria had a sort of emblematic recognition, a consecration, by one of the most official art critics: Francesco Bonami included one of her looms, Object-Landscape (1967), in Italics. Italian Art between Tradition and Revolution, 1968–2008, the controversial yet very popular exhibition that opened in September at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Lai was among the one hundred artists invited: not many if we think of how many painters and sculptors had been working in the various cities of our country in those forty years. That was the beginning of an unprecedented attention toward Maria, who was accustomed to a critical silence broken only by a few voices. In the last years of her life, she was at the center of studies, essays, interviews, videos, documentaries, films (Ansia d’infinito of 2009, by Clarita Di Giovanni) as only a few other living artists were.

In the meanwhile, the author of the Looms continued her work without worrying about critical clamor, but at the same time, without avoiding the commitment of talking about art and her works, every time she was asked. Her grace of a ninety-year-old girl, her slow, simple words, that always seemed to be those of a fairy tale, her apologetic Zen, even when dealing with the most difficult concepts; all of these elements exert a singular fascination on people, and are indispensable proves for any study on her search.

Again in 2008, she designed another Via Crucis, made of wood and stone, for the church of San Paolo in Cardedu; the Stations of the Cross are written in the Sardinian language of the Ogliastra region, and Christ is symbolized by a round white form, bread-like. The same year, she installed the panels of the Five Words on the façade of a former distillery in Pirri, in the municipality of Cagliari.194 In 2009, she designed La cattura dell’ala del vento (The Capture of the Wind’s Wing) for the entrance of the Larenzu Wind Farm in Ulassai (fig. 446). The artist immediately stood in favor of the gigantic wind turbines moved by the wind (“They seemed to me like big flowers in a garden, stars beyond the earth. Distances call me, said Pessoa”) and, for the park, she realized another drawing in the air. She based the composition on the outline of a group of Minimalist geometric prisms, overlaid by small figures that recall some bodiless silhouettes of Guernica; actually, as she herself confessed, it had been inspired by the mask of a Native Americans’ god of wind she had seen in Canada in 1968. “I had been planning for some years, to make a work that celebrated one of the typical atmospheric elements of our town. An anthem dedicated to the wind. … I was mainly inspired by a mask I have owned for over half a century [for 41 years], and of which I am very fond,” she declared.195 Distances in the style of Pessoa, are also those she designed in 2010, in the monumental Cucire e ricucire sul diritto e sul rovescio (Sewing and Mending on the Plain and Purl Stitch) for the new lecture hall of the Facoltà di Giurisprudenza in Cagliari (figs. 443–444). It is 328

her most significant sewn work: a trajectory at the same time mysterious and well defined, that moves toward infinity. Maria played with words: the term diritto [straight] indicates the law, and it becomes the plain stitch of weaving, a needlework that is patiently performed on one side and the other, in every condition and at any condition. The work is another wall painting, or rather a wall weaving, accessible to everyone. “I began with a Gramsci notebook. He gave me an image, and I started from there. He said that art must arrive to normal people. When a worker goes to work, doing every day the same commute, he doesn’t realize the architectural works he sees. However, in this way his sight acquires a visual rhythm.”196 Equally monumental is the following Orme di leggi (Traces of Laws, 2011), to which a jury presided over by Gino Agnese (then president of the Rome Quadriennale), awarded the Chamber of Deputies Award in November of the same year, on the 150th anniversary of the Italian unification (figs. 445).

At this point, as Maria Sofia Pisu (niece of the artist) remembered, Lai was sick but had designed her new work with enthusiasm; she placed on a large panel a row of textile pages, on which she wrote her illegible writing, coloring in black the ones on the left, as if to pay tribute to the tragedies of the Risorgimento. One night a gust of wind disarranged the composition, yet the artist decided to leave it the way it was, because she thought that even that involuntary chaos had a meaning. In the final result of the work, the whiter zone in the center symbolizes the Constitution, while the traces of red on the right allude to the fears of the present. “The artist is the one who takes on the world’s fears, turning them into a project,” she once said. The large panel was supposed to be titled Norma (Norm), but to avoid misunderstandings the name changed to Orme (Traces), indicating the traces left by the laws.197 Despite her compromised health, the artist continued to work.

Her last great work is the Monument to Grazia Deledda, located in Nuoro near the Church of Solitude, where the writer is buried (figs. 447–448). For a singular coincidence, it is again a work dedicated to an artist, one of the many Janas that accompanied her during her long search. It is one of her most metaphysical installations: eleven white travertine pillars, on which a few sentences alternate with black wrought-iron outlines of Sardinian women and flocks. At the entrance of that space of memory, she also placed a white frame on which she drew one of her visionary geometries, culminating in a triangle pointing to a distant destination. The work was supposed to be titled Andando via (Going Away),198 an expression that betrays an idea of dismissal. Unfortunately, the inauguration announced for March 2012, was postponed for several reasons. Maria would not make it to see it.

In July, the artist lost her beloved sister Giuliana, a life partner, collaborator and accomplice of many of her works. Despite the mourning, she did not leave the art scene. In December, she exhibited her work in an individual space at the Pulse Contemporary

432–433. To Be is to Weave, July 2016, Aggius, photo by Mario Saragato.

The environmental event To be is to Weave. The Weaving Put on a Show is the last collective event lead by the artist, almost her spiritual will. Introduced by meetings and conferences, in order to make it comprehensible and to involve the whole town, the event takes place on July 26, 2008. Already two months earlier, Maria had installed thirteen Looms on the facade of the houses located in the old town.

Her other works, then, as flocks of goats, letters of the alphabet, and tapestries, are disseminated in the MEOC museum, in the town hall, and in the streets of the town.

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Anthology.

Writings by Maria Lai

1. The island (from Il Convegno, IX, No. 7, July 1956).

The charm of this island, from the first encounter of those coming from the sea, originates from the stones: the first rocks that appear are such that you would not be surprised to see Polyphemus or a procession of sea monsters among them. But no literary memory is able to populate these absolute, almost absurd, solitudes. Man faces a primordial nature, that could have emerged from the waters in that moment or, as in reality, have waited for millennia for someone who could comprehend it, discovering its secret. A male friend “from the mainland,” whom I was trying to guide to capture the charm of this landscape, used to comment with gentle irony, not without compassion: “Yeah, everybody loves the stones from their own homeland.”

But in his land, stones are taken over by vegetation and man, revealing a civilization that was able to shape nature. On this island, on the other hand, time seems to have passed without changing that much since the Creation, and man did not dare to impose himself on nature. In fact, he got intrigued by these fascinating silences, in a thoughtful contemplation.

In the arid landscape, the few flowers are replaced by its women: with a sparkling palette, their intricated hairstyles, and the beautiful jewels of their costumes. But even them, suggest more than just revealing. The eternal feminine charm defends itself behind such a marvelous variety of shapes and colors; it secretly gives life to the landscape and to the rustic houses, whose solemn simplicity dominates by contrast, becoming more attractive. The meaning of this charm cannot be captured in the famous celebrations of costume parades in Cagliari and Sassari, but only in the intimacy of the poor houses in Ollolai, Orgosolo, and Desulo; in an almost ritual life, that slowly marks the time. Who was born here feels reflected and almost clarified by this nature and by this life; for those who come from the outside, here is the solution to the enigma: the effort is not a matter of culture or experience, but only of a sensitivity that can understand the language of these rocks.

Arturo Martini told us, “We should make stones talk.” From this absurd immobility, which is not only geographic isola-

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449. Maria Lai, 1955, photo by Marianne Sin-Pfältzer.

tion but primordial tendency of men to resign themselves to fatality, I think that only art can open the way to reconnect this island to the world.

2. Arturo Martini’s teaching, narrated by his last student, the artist Maria Lai (in Pandora. Laboratori dell’arte applicata, I, 1992; extract from the meeting with Maria Lai at the headquarters of the Pandora Studio in Turin, 1990).

Martini modeled the clay by shaping empty spaces; this has been a discovery of the last years of his life that only a few people know about. Martini’s problem at that time was to draw attention away from the statuary (in those years, 1943–45, he was writing the book Dead Language Sculpture). He did not care much if we comprehended his lessons; I stored his words, which I understood only many years later. I attended the art high school in Rome, and he taught me that painting creates spaces on a plane, and architecture spaces for the man’s path.

Sculpture instead creates volumes that have to be placed in the spaces made by architecture: it was about full presences with all of their weight.

Martini began to tell us that all this was not true. Sculpture, just like architecture, had to build empty spaces, had to indicate silence and empty spaces, not because the man would walk on it, or live there, but because he would feel sculpture as a breathing body, like rising bread dough. This is the reason behind his way of working the clay: pushing it from the inside, not pressing it from the outside. He applied this method also to his great sculptures, creating every shape as if it was a house, starting from the main walls. It was as if he was building a structure made of empty boxes, like a card castle. It was necessary to stay breathless, and this was for him an essential and primary condition. He was horrified by people who worked the clay by compressing it, and then shaped it by removing bits of it; he said that this was like killing the matter, rather than making it alive.

In order to build a head, for example, he used to begin by building a frame shaped like a cross (the main walls) that was supposed to serve as a supporting structure; then, he would shape the two sides, the lateral and the frontal ones; when the structure was solid enough, he would build horizontal planes (the floors), which could coincide, for example, with the jaw.

On this structure, realized with extreme constructive rigor, were 351

applied clay sheets, leaving holes in which to insert someone’s hands, allowing to work and mold its shape from the inside.

There was then a definitive and decisive operation, which consisted in cutting the sculpture in different parts and then re-assembling it in different positions, different from the original; in this way, the expression of the figure changed (he called it “scoppola”: to give it a slap in the back of the neck). For instance, he would make three or four figurines, and he generally positioned them as if they were talking to each other: there was almost a contact between them that would become an intimate space; he would display these figures in the middle of the room, and before our terrified eyes, he would cut them apart; this was the most important lesson. Then, he would recompose them by swapping their parts. Immediately, that would give a sense of a landscape around the composition. With this change of position each figure, instead of looking crippled seemed to acquire motion, as if in a search for empty spaces, for air to breathe.

Sometimes it was necessary just a cut to make a work “sing.”

Martini did not say, “A work is beautiful” or “I like it;” he would only say, “It sings” or “It doesn’t sing.”

He loved those models or statuettes with a shambling look, that makes the viewer not pay attention directly to the statue, allowing the sight to wander around and not to focus on the work: this should no longer be a certainty but the departure toward a void. Even portraits represent figures that seem to be listening to: a silence or a voice that they do not understand. There was always this attention, this amazement, such as when he would represent people who just woke up or were sleeping; in this way, he could represent the dream, in which there is this immense space, this huge silence.

I remember that once he did not want us to represent the human body but just stones, and we did not understand why. He even held a kind of contest with a cash prize, in an envelope he showed to us; he told us that we had three months. We made so many stones! Then he came and he did not like any of them.

He would put them on a stand, and watch them from all angles. Eventually, he would throw them to the wall (he was an irascible person …); he was so mad that he left, saying we could not understand him. He said we had made sensitive stones but not built stones Here is the problem of the construction that I understood way later. We all wanted to see his stones but he did not allow us to.

Myself in particular, being the only woman in the class (on top of that, I was short), I was the one he considered the least. Since I was a little stubborn, once I decided to hide in my studio (because back then every student had a personal studio) and wait until everyone in the Academy left. I looked for the keys of Martini’s studio and I had five hours to finally look at everything in perfect solitude: in the center of the room there were three huge bronze stones, one on top of the other as a dolmen.

At the moment I did not understand, then I began to touch them and I realized that they were curled up human bodies: I felt their breath inside. That work was Death of Sappho (which, according to legend, was thrown down the cliff on the rocks).

Then I got to an absurd conclusion; I thought, “He wants us to forget the human body, but he seeks it in the stones. Maybe he wants to confuse us, he is a deceiver.” It took me a while before I realized that he really wanted us to find the human again, not in the figure of the statuary but in the stone.

He told us that the first sculptor that struck him when he started was Medardo Rosso, who at the time was considered to be an anti-sculptor, one not to be taken seriously. For this reason, 352

he was seen as controversial by his teachers, and so he abandoned his studies. Since the beginning, there was in him a rejection of the statuary. He would tell us students, “But why did you come to learn how to make sculptures? Sculpture is over, it has no future.” I was the only one of those few students who continued to follow him on this path.

I understood many things once I returned to Sardinia, where I found the stones smoothed by the wind, and where they had all the experience in making bread, prepared with layers of dough.

If back then I had made one of those stones, I am sure he would have been excited: he wanted the stones to be empty inside, and we did not quite understand. It is often believed that human relationships are important for learning art; it is true, but they have to be difficult, otherwise you cannot learn art. In Rome, I had been pampered too much and I did not learn anything. Martini cornered me instead: he is the only one I learned something from; what he taught me was like a seed that gave its fruit long afterwards.

3. Between one side and the other (from To the Giant up There. Tribute to Nivola 1988–2008.

Loom-Theaters by Maria Lai, exhibition catalogue (Orani, May 10 – July 2008), Cagliari 2008). … My Sardinian roots penetrate into the depths of a rich and hard soil, that nourishes my plant. But by nature, every plant directs its branches away from its roots…

The first time I left Sardinia was in 1939. At the age of 20, I did not feel just an inexhaustible need for freedom, I was also aware of my other self, still distant and unknown, but capable of conditioning my anxieties.

The years of war, first spent in Rome and then in Venice, kept me away from family affections and my island. I was twice a stranger, first because I was Sardinian, wild, primitive, and second for being the only woman amongst Arturo Martini’s students at the Academy in Venice. Arturo Martini was still from that generation that did not give women space in art. He used to say, “Here, we do it seriously;” my presence was an obstacle for him. But I did not doubt that I was in the right place, even though I was thinking of Sardinia and of my family, with the remorse of a betrayal.

Those were the years of aerial bombing, both on the cities and on the certainties that the history, and in particular the history of art of the near past, had left us. We were moving toward the discovery of the unconscious and the primitive. The question of many of the values we had acquired was already underway.

In the meanwhile, Arturo Martini was writing the book Scultura lingua morta (Dead Language Sculpture).

In 1945, when I left Venice to return to Sardinia, I was full of doubts about the role of art in the world; and more than ever I was torn between the need to continue the journey I had undertaken and the desire not to disappoint my family, who had been very anxious over the three years of war because of my lack of news. They allowed me to become an adult, and I realized how high was the price of my freedom, when the people I loved were the ones paying for it. There was no convincing reason for a future departure, it seemed impossible.

My father, whom I loved with passion, was a veterinarian in a town of shepherds and goats and he never imposed his will on me. He always helped me but at the same time, he was always worried about my projects, “It’ll go away.” For my mother the idea of my emancipation meant scandal, a silent suffering.

The question that my family asked me was: “What do you think you’ll do?” Simply, I was not thinking; same as when I draw on a white page and I know that only in the end I will be able to see the image. That departure was my white page.

4. To the Giant up There (from To the Giant up There. Tribute to Nivola 1988–2008.

Loom-Theaters by Maria Lai, exhibition catalogue (Orani, May 10 – July 2008), Cagliari 2008).

We were both students of the great Arturo Martini [actually Nivola had not been a student of Martini, but had joined the ISIA in Monza when the sculptor had just left the school], even if in different times and places. I was destined to meet Nivola, in order to realize with greater clarity a renewal in my consciousness of what art meant to me.

We were distant and strangers to each other, but involved in the same great ferments that the art world lived in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was then that I saw Nivola’s litte beds exposed in Rome at the Marlborough Gallery: the small hand-sized terracotta sculptures looked like stones scattered in the grass of a wheat field.

On a large table, a lawn of soft grass was artificially sprouted.

The small beds narrate stories of private life in the darkness of the night: the intimacy of love, loneliness, presence and absence, among messy sheets.

An Easter tradition of our island consists in growing in every house wheat dishes, that are sprouted in the darkness for about twenty days, not in the cold soil but on woolen flakes.

Su nenneri, a kind of grass that darkness turns pale, making it white; as if purified by the pain, supported by holiday ribbons of the resurrection, is displayed on the ground around a horizontal cross that each church prepares.

It is a sacred representation built on rhythms of gestures and prayers, of a community seeking in the mystery the sense of life; a mystery that logic cannot explain, as it cannot explain the act of playing, love and every form of art, in its relation with the infinite.

Nivola’s little beds, exposed in Rome, were the occasion for a recognition, a new and unpredictable guide to what art meant to me; even though, perhaps, it was just my anxiety.

5. Maria Pietra (from F. Di Castro, M. Lai, The Stone and the Fear, Cagliari, Arte Duchamp, 2006).

Maria Pietra is the character of the tale Cuore mio by Salvatore Cambosu: a mother who agrees to be turned into stone to save her baby from death.

In this interpretation she becomes a commoner that, before being a mother, is endowed with unknown and forbidden powers.

Like every poet, she is afraid of them.

The powers of Maria Pietra could not be used for practical purposes, not even for a great love like that of a mother for her sick child. Maria Pietra is a baker and with her words she can fascinate and capture all creatures, but she must learn to use her powers.

When her son, in the middle of a fever delirium, asks to play with the forest animals, the mother challenges her fears and uses her powers; she captures from distant woods, one at a time, fawns, hares and turtle doves, which die right after arriving.

Maria Pietra, involved in the delirium of her child, will witness his death; even if mad with pain, she finds again her creativity.

An art that is born out of every logic realizes the miracle: while kneading the flour with her tears and making so many bread children figurines, she brings her son back to life; he is finally able to play with the resurrected forest animals.

The multiplied child meets the many - egos - of his upbringing, which is entrusted to games, to fairy tales, and to artworks.

Metaphorical images Maria Pietra: the artist Fear: it generates creativity Pietra: art Child: the malaise of the world The forest animals: games for children, works of art for adults.

6. Tying Oneself to the Mountain (in E. De Cecco, “Maria Lai. Le fila del racconto”, in Flash Art, XXIX, No. 199, summer 1996).

I had a problem with my town, I had not been there for decades. I was living in Rome, and I was convinced that I would never return there. I had a score to settle because one of my brothers had been killed, and for no reason I wanted to know who was the culprit. One day the mayor called me, and I presented myself with a group of friends; they were in charge of stopping the talk if he had mentioned the matter. The town council was convened, and I came to know that they wanted to entrust me with the realization of a war memorial. Then I started to laugh, I was completely skeptical, but the mayor insisted that they had collected a sum of money and would be willing to increase it … “I don’t want to realize this work,” I said, “Because it’s something I do not believe in. Why are you thinking of a war memorial, when every town in Italy has one, and for the most part are ugly?” They seemed to have a sort of inferiority complex because the name of the town did not appear in all the maps, and most of the inhabitants are goat shepherds; it is a forgotten town and its residents are less than two thousand …

But they wanted to make history at all costs; it is commonly known that being on the map means making history, and a monument can help. Then I said that in order to make history, we must create history, and not do what everyone else has done. We must do something that has never been done anywhere in the world, and these words closed our meeting.

After a year and a half they called me back, asking me what was my plan. I started looking around and I found out that every353