“Ricucire il mondo”: il racconto dell’arte di Maria Lai

Maria Lai (1919-2013) belongs to the constellation of artists who, with a subtle voice, knew how to shape her artistic experience by gracefully forcing the scans and rigid chronologies of a teleological and sexist art history.From the very beginning, her trajectory is gently aimed at a deep research that explores art as a space for verifying and modifying the condition of women and relational practices. She was foreign to the poetics of the art groups and she reflected on female work, bringing together personal memory and collective memory, through the emblematic and precious gesture of weaving. Her project has fluctuated over the years between an intimate dimension, that joined diary and autobiography through the stitching/writing of small stories embroidered on sheets as book pages, and a community and relational dimension through big environmental actions, such as the work Legarsi alla montagna (Tying to the Mountain) (Ulassai, 1981).This essay aims to analyze the central points of this itinerary that in the encounter between weaving, embroidery and writing explores in an elegiac and intimate way the alterity of the feminine condition and reflects on the sense of bond, history and tradition within the community.