On the morning of 8 September 1981, in Ulassai, a village of stone set in the mountains of eastern Sardinia, the inhabitants gathered in a field and began tearing cloth. Thirteen lengths of pale blue fabric, given by a local merchant, were pulled by hand into strips and carried from house to house. Between two households joined by kinship or affection, a loaf of the bread baked for feast days was tied into the ribbon. Between neighbours merely acquainted, a knot. Between enemies, the ribbon was drawn taut and left to run smooth, unmarked. Twenty-six kilometres of it crossed the village that day. At the end the threads joined the Christian procession and were tied to the Madonna’s blue mantle. The next morning six climbers took the ribbon up the rock face of Monte Gedili.
The woman who conceived this, Maria Lai, never settled on a word for what she had made. It has since been called relational art, public art, participatory practice, ritual action. In an essay for the journal Itinera, Laura Aimo sets the labels aside for a different question. She wants to know what the village learned by doing it, and how learning of that kind happens at all.
The Fracture Is Not in What We Know
Aimo begins from a gap. Western culture has been built, for something like ten thousand years, on a logic of separation and on the dominion of man over nature and of one man over another. That paradigm is now showing its catastrophic effects, and has been challenged scientifically from many directions. The challenge has not descended from theory into perception, even among those who profess ecocentric and systemic thinking. We understand interdependence without living it. The deepest fracture, Aimo writes, concerns not knowledge itself but its integration.
Three questions follow. How can art disclose relations that ordinarily pass unnoticed? How can such disclosure become embodied experience rather than abstract knowledge? And how can recognizing a relation that already exists generate responsibility for it? What is at stake is the possibility of aesthetic education: not art enlisted to shape perception and taste around a thought already formed, but an education that recognizes the mutual making of body and logos, moment by moment.
The word Aimo turns on here is one Alexander Baumgarten used in 1750, in the founding text of the discipline. Nature does not leap, he wrote, neither outside us nor within. Noon comes out of night by way of dawn, and our clear and distinct representations come out of confused ones. Confusion is not simply an error. The word means fused together, and it names an original co-unity, a state in which things have not yet been pulled apart. Taking care of that state rather than abolishing it is how thought stays faithful to the continuum of being. Aimo adopts Baumgarten’s order of attention as her method — the thing first, its shining order second, signs only third — and prefers the account of the event’s genesis to an analysis of its structure.
A Monument Refused
Ulassai lies in the Ogliastra, among deep gorges and caves and waterfalls, including Sardinia’s highest. It is sublime and, at once, impervious to inhabit: a place of landslides, floods and droughts. Violence between people marked it too; the area was once the most bandit-infested in the region. In 1955 Maria Lai’s brother Lorenzo was killed in an ambush meant for another brother. She was determined never to learn the murderer’s name, and she left for Rome and stayed away more than twenty years.
In 1980 the mayor invited her home and commissioned a war memorial, hoping her fame would carry the village into history. She refused. She wanted to do something for the living: to make history not by commemorating what had been but by doing what had been done nowhere else, though she did not yet know what. Aimo places the refusal at the centre of Lai’s poetics. Memory in it is not an archive or a mausoleum or a collection of monolithic data, but a living laboratory of traces, ghosts and possibilities always still to be fulfilled.
Four Acts
The event unfolds, in Aimo’s reconstruction, as a rite in four acts. The first is waiting. The proposal sat in the municipality for a year and a half, and it is in that process of encounter and confrontation that the work begins. The village had not been talking to itself. Lai gives it something to think about and waits.
The second act goes to the past. She interviews the elders and gathers the myths of the country, and one holds her: Sa Rutta de Is’Antigus, the Cave of the Ancients. A girl carries bread to shepherds on the mountain. A storm breaks, and she shelters with them and their flocks in a cave, and from its mouth she sees a pale blue ribbon tossed by the wind. The shepherds take it for something mislaid. The girl, still capable of wonder, runs out after it into the rain, and at that moment the roof comes down on the sheep and the men. Vico held that a story preserved and handed down has a reason for truth in it. Lai understood the tale as a fantastic universal, an apprehension of the world that is also a departure point for new creations. Art, in the same light, is something simple and often discarded, like a thread carried by the wind, superfluous and yet saving, because it gives direction.
From that thread came the plan: bind the houses to one another, and all of them to the mountain. It was a crazy idea, since the neighbours did not speak. People asked who was paying her, and whether this was art at all. Lai’s answer was to take the relations exactly as she found them, which is why the ribbon between enemies runs taut and bare.
The third act is the day. 8 September is the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, and the threads joined the procession and were tied to the Madonna’s dress. For Lai there was no opposition between art and religion, as none between culture and nature; the blue of the mantle and the blue of the ribbon spring from one source. The date carries another weight. It is the anniversary of the Italian armistice of 1943, the start of chaos and civil strife on the peninsula, though no text records Lai reflecting on the coincidence. For one day the villagers perceived as one what they lived daily as distinct and irreconcilable. The art historian Filippo Menna wrote that legend had become reality, and that art had succeeded where religion and politics failed.
The fourth act Aimo calls active surrender. The next day a musician walked the village playing the flute, a release after the previous day’s melee and an invitation to silence and finer feeling. Then six climbers carried the thread to the summit of Gedili. The wire, Lai said, looked like a stream of water gushing from the rock. Life cannot be controlled or predicted or optimized. What can be renewed is the sense of belonging to a larger unity in constant transformation.
What the Wind Took
The work was made not to endure. By autumn the wind had taken the ribbons, and Aimo, borrowing Gordon Matta-Clark’s coinage by way of Andrea Pinotti, calls the piece a non-ument, planned from the first to disappear, teaching the value of process and evanescence. Its aura, in Benjamin’s sense, comes from the unrepeatable appearance of a relation made perceptible in one place and time. What sets it apart from the Happening and from Land Art is a ritual force anchored in the territory and in the bodies that made it. The community did not look at an artwork. It was drawn into a reconfiguration of its own senses, through which mountain, village, memory, conflict and care were temporarily bound.
Lai knew the limits of what she had done. People made the work, she said, and appreciated it, and did not understand it. What followed, according to a 2011 study, was a community-laboratory. The women’s textile work was re-established, and the money set aside for the war memorial went to restoring the old wash house, giving them a public place to meet. In 2006 the disused railway station became a museum holding more than a hundred and forty works the artist gave.
The case is particular: one artist, one village in a corner of Sardinia, one myth belonging to that rock and one bread belonging to that calendar. From it Aimo draws a proposal about aesthetic education. Art of this kind does not represent an environment; it activates environment as relation, rendering perceptible bonds that were already there and cultivating a perceptual proximity by which recognition turns into responsibility and care. No doctrine and no art holds the key to the future, if there is one. It has to be made together, beginning from what is already at hand — the genius loci, and the conflicts too.
Aimo, Laura. “Feeling Closer to Each Other: An Art-Based Environmental Education from Maria Lai’s Legarsi alla montagna.” Itinera: Rivista di filosofia e teoria delle arti, no. 31 (2026): 195–207. https://doi.org/10.54103/2039-9251/32302.
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