In 1979, the mayor of Ulassai asked Maria Lai to create a war memorial that would put the village on the map and mark its entry into history. The artist firmly refused: to make history, she replied, required creating something unprecedented. A year later, the town council contacted her again to ask what she had in mind.
Lai returned to her birthplace and began speaking with people she met on the streets. She discovered that, among the many legends of Ogliastra, everyone in Ulassai—elders and children alike—knew the story of the grotta degli antichi (the cave of the ancients). Passed down through generations, the tale tells of a girl who climbed the mountain to bring food to shepherds. Suddenly, rain began to fall, and everyone rushed to take shelter in a cave. Drawn by a blue ribbon fluttering in the sky, the girl wandered off into the storm just as the cave collapsed, burying the shepherds and their flock.
It was the memory of myths and folktales that united the community. The story bound them in a shared intimacy—even if harsh or restless. Lai proposed tying Ulassai together with a blue ribbon and fixing this long strip of fabric to the mountain. After initial hesitation, participation spread like wildfire. The village’s only fabric merchant donated rolls of denim, yielding 26 kilometers of ribbon.
The problem then was resentment—you can’t easily tie yourself to everyone. If I bind myself to that person, they might have cursed me… terrible stories of stolen goats, violent deaths… binding can sometimes compromise a family’s dignity… We solved it by creating a code: where the ribbon ran straight, there was resentment; where there was friendship, one or more knots; where there was love, festive breads were hung.
Legarsi alla montagna (Binding to the Mountain) relied on simple gestures—running, tying knots—to create art expressed not through objects but through relationships, forging connections without ignoring their fleeting or fragile nature. On September 8, 1981, at the appointed hour, the people of Ulassai filled the village streets, choosing knots to link their homes to others. The next day, the ribbon was fastened to a cliff overlooking the town: “From below, it looked like a stream of water trembling in the wind.”
The theme of binding and stitching runs through Maria Lai’s work since the early 1970s, when she began creating fabrics basted with sewing-machine thread, and finds its natural culmination in her Books and Cartographies, which became among her most iconic works.
Through marks devoid of verbal meaning, Lai’s art weaves silence and emptiness to embody abstraction—like stones carved by wind or the late sculptures of Arturo Martini (under whom she studied). Her unreadable pages can be interpreted infinitely, yet this wordless writing also tests the edges of language with knots and stitches, because “Ariadne’s thread helps us escape the labyrinth.” What does this limit of language and meaning signify? Can we experience it or turn back? Is it, as Agamben suggests, about ceasing to imagine words beyond words? “Having returned from where we never were, we are finally here, where we can never return.”
In Lai’s work, threads mend tears and separations—ties that bind without transforming things: a knot can always be cut or unraveled. “Places and traces of thought remain intact, entrusted to memory, which is another thread, another stitch.” This art, woven from memory and everyday gestures, unafraid of silence, binds its unreadable words to ordinary objects. After all, daily life is held together by knots and fastenings, and if the stitches come undone, language unravels.
