ABSTRACT
Eastern Central Sardinia was presented with of a series of challenges of both cultural and natural origin after the Second World War. In 1951 several villages in Ogliastra province were swept away by floods. Internal displacement and emigration continued to depopulate the region. The continuity of local country church-based holiday festivals, thenovenari, and the role of the sacred village festa with its components of bread making, weaving, costumes, music, and poetry all seemed at odds with recently adopted patterns of holiday that did not require the commitment of an entire community or even a religious context. Chaos in Italian politics at the end of the 1970s also had a disruptive impact on central Sardinian communities, including Ulassai. The émigré sculptor Maria Lai returned from Rome to the place of her birth in 1979, summoned to design a war memorial for the village. The artist had incubated a profound sensitivity for the complexity of the social metabolism of Sardinian custom. In the place of a war memorial, she proposed an unorthodox elaboration of the annual procession of the Birth of the Virgin as a monument ‘to the living by the living’. An initiative that would resonate with a resurgent Sardinian identity. She adapted the motif of the blue ribbon that was used as a train attached to the throne of the Madonna to extend it to 26 kilometres of fabric and deployed as a whole town weaving art installation augmented by suspended bows and woven breads as an improvised social index. Guided by the imagery of a local folk tale of a shepherdess she tied every street of the village and also the summit of an 80-metre-high local mountain into the webwork of the ribbon dressing: legarsi alla montagna. She encouraged the population to claim the event as their own heritage and as a landmark for a new era. Many were to rediscover and celebrate the richness of the culture and skills they already possessed by dressing every street, balcony, window frame, private and public, all tied into the same social stratum: a type of cooperative and redemptive act.
The performance was much more successful than might have been predicted and has been discussed in the context of 1980s art activism and community empowerment. The chapter evaluates elements that were already indigenous to the traditional Festa della Madonna at Ulassai and related Sardinian festivals with their enigmatic ritual components, to position Legarsi alla montagna inside the narrative of a late twentieth-century Sardinian renaissance.
