Maria Lai: The Artist Who Stitched a Village Together

In September 1981, the residents of Ulassai, a small mountain town in the Ogliastra region of eastern Sardinia, took part in an artwork that had no gallery, no admission fee, and, at first, no obvious explanation. Following instructions from the artist Maria Lai, herself born in the town, families tied one end of a length of pale blue cloth ribbon to their own front doors and carried the other end up the steep slopes toward Monte Gedili, the mountain that rises directly above Ulassai, until roughly twenty-six kilometers of ribbon connected nearly every house in the town to the mountainside and to each other. The work was called Legarsi alla Montagna — “Binding to the Mountain” — and it is now recognized as one of the earliest and most fully realized examples of what art history would later, decades after the fact, formalize as relational or participatory art: work whose actual medium is a community’s collective action rather than any physical object a viewer might contemplate alone.

An artist formed by absence and thread

Lai was born in Ulassai in 1919, and her early biography reads like a preparation for exactly the kind of art she would eventually make. A childhood illness kept her largely out of formal schooling; she was sent, as a partial substitute, to live for a period with an aunt in a nearby town, and she has described the experience of separation from her family and her native landscape as formative to her later, lifelong preoccupation with connection, distance, and the threads — literal and figurative — that hold people to places and to each other. She studied sculpture in Rome and later in Venice under Arturo Martini, one of twentieth-century Italy’s most significant sculptors, absorbing a formal training in figurative modeling that she would spend much of her subsequent career deliberately setting aside.

By the 1950s and 1960s, Lai had begun moving away from conventional sculpture toward the materials and techniques of domestic textile work — thread, cloth, bread dough, needle and loom — media coded, in the art world of her era, as craft rather than fine art, and further coded, in a deeply gendered way, as women’s domestic labor rather than serious artistic practice. Lai’s deliberate elevation of these materials into a formal artistic vocabulary anticipated, again well ahead of its later theoretical framing, feminist art history’s sustained reappraisal of textile and craft media as legitimate sites of serious artistic ambition rather than lesser, feminized alternatives to painting and sculpture.

Books that cannot be read

Among Lai’s most distinctive recurring works are her libri cuciti — sewn books — objects built from cloth, thread, and sometimes actual pages, stitched together in forms that mimic the structure of a book while resisting the book’s primary function: they cannot be opened and read in any conventional sense. The stitching itself becomes a form of writing, an alternative language of knots, seams, and irregular thread paths standing in for text that was never inscribed. Lai made hundreds of these objects over her career, in scales ranging from small handheld pieces to room-sized installations, and they represent a sustained meditation on a theme she returned to across nearly every medium she worked in: the gap between the desire to communicate and the inadequacy, or outright absence, of legible language to do it.

That preoccupation connects directly to Legarsi alla Montagna, which grew out of an invitation from a friend, the writer Anna Cattani, to create a work for a local arts festival in Ulassai and which Lai initially conceived, by her own later account, from a half-remembered local folk tale about a girl who tied a thread to a mountain to escape it — a story Lai was never fully able to verify existed in the form she recalled, which she treated less as a research problem than as evidence that the artwork’s real subject was the ambiguous, half-invented relationship between a community and its own inherited stories.

A relational artwork before the theory existed

Art historians writing about participatory and relational practice — the strand of contemporary art, associated internationally with figures like Rirkrit Tiravanija and formalized critically in the 1990s under the term “relational aesthetics” — have increasingly identified Legarsi alla Montagna as a genuine precedent that predates the theoretical framework by more than a decade. Lai’s work required the active, physical participation of essentially the entire town: residents chose how and where to tie their ribbons, improvised connections between houses that had no formal relationship, and in some documented cases used the act of tying to symbolically repair long-standing personal or family disputes, turning an ostensibly aesthetic exercise into something closer to genuine communal reconciliation. The work existed for only a matter of days before the ribbons were taken down, and it survives now primarily through photographic documentation and the memory of the participants — an artwork whose ephemerality was, unlike the disposable public art projects it superficially resembles, integral to its meaning rather than incidental to it.

Lai returned to Ulassai and to related communal, textile-based practice throughout the following decades, and the town has since embraced her legacy institutionally: the Stazione dell’Arte, a museum dedicated to her work, opened in Ulassai’s former railway station, giving a small mountain town an unlikely permanent home for one of postwar Italy’s most significant and, outside Italy, still underrecognized artists. The Museo Stazione dell’Arte maintains the principal collection of her work and documentation of Legarsi alla Montagna for visitors making the trip to Ogliastra specifically to see it.

Bread, geography, and the materials of home

Textile was not Lai’s only unconventional medium. Across her career she also worked extensively with bread dough, shaping it into small sculptural forms and, in a related body of work, treating geography and cartography as material to be physically reconstructed rather than merely depicted — sewn and knotted works that resemble maps of Sardinia or of Ulassai’s surrounding landscape without functioning as usable maps in any practical sense. The recurring logic across these different materials is consistent: Lai repeatedly chose media associated with domestic, everyday, often explicitly feminized labor — sewing, baking, weaving — and asked them to carry the conceptual weight that twentieth-century art history had reserved almost exclusively for oil paint, bronze, and marble.

This choice was never simply provocative for its own sake. Lai spoke about her materials as carrying an inherited memory of her own mother’s and grandmother’s domestic labor, work that structured the daily life of Ulassai for generations of women without ever being considered artistically significant in its own right. By insisting on thread and dough as legitimate sculptural material, Lai’s work quietly argued that the distinction between craft and fine art was itself a historical construction rather than a natural hierarchy — an argument feminist art historians would spend the following decades making at greater theoretical length, often citing Lai’s practice as an early and unusually direct demonstration of the point.

A late, growing recognition

Lai continued working into her nineties and died in 2013 at the age of ninety-three, having exhibited internationally with increasing frequency in the final decades of her long career. Her profile grew further still after her death, including a prominent posthumous presentation at the 2017 Venice Biennale — the kind of institutional attention that has become a familiar, if uncomfortable, pattern for women artists whose fullest critical recognition arrives only once their working life has ended. Her practice sits within a wider Sardinian tradition of artists who drew on Nuragic and folk-craft forms without simply illustrating them, a lineage that includes the sculptor Costantino Nivola, whose sand-cast reliefs share Lai’s interest in transforming humble, non-canonical materials and techniques into a serious contemporary artistic language. Where Nivola carried Sardinian form to New York, Lai spent her career demonstrating that a mountain village of a few thousand people could itself be the site, and the medium, of art fully equal to anything produced in a metropolitan gallery.

FAQ

Q: Who was Maria Lai? A: A Sardinian artist (1919–2013) born in Ulassai, known for elevating textile and craft techniques — thread, cloth, sewn books — into a serious contemporary artistic vocabulary, and for Legarsi alla Montagna (1981), a landmark participatory artwork involving her entire home village.

Q: What was Legarsi alla Montagna? A: A 1981 communal artwork in which residents of Ulassai tied ribbon from their own front doors to the mountainside above the town, connecting roughly twenty-six kilometers of ribbon across the community. It is now recognized as an important early precedent for relational and participatory art.

Q: What are Maria Lai’s “sewn books”? A: A recurring body of work — the libri cuciti — made from stitched cloth and thread in the form of books that cannot be conventionally opened or read. The stitching itself functions as an alternative language, exploring the gap between the desire to communicate and legible written text.

Q: Where can visitors see Maria Lai’s work today? A: The Stazione dell’Arte, a museum in Ulassai’s former railway station, holds the principal collection of her work and documentation of Legarsi alla Montagna. Her work is also held in wider Italian and international museum collections following growing critical recognition in her final decades.