120 121 You know this column was born from an act of secular faith: taking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights seriously. You know that, each time, we choose a great artist for their capacity to defend a right, because art is not meant to draw pretty flourishes: it is meant to awaken. It happens that the aforementioned Declaration, though not legally binding, still holds up the very skeleton of international law, safeguarding principles without which coexistence dries out, it crumbles. Non-negotiable principles, and yet highly fragile ones, able to survive only if we protect them, renew them, believe in them. It happens that we are making the fatal mistake of decadent civilizations: we are taking them for granted. It happens that we live in a time in which whatever is not legally binding is treated as if it were emotionally optional. It happens that our era is hollowing out rights through a lethal mix of wear carelessness and delusions of omnipotence, listening to them with the same attention we give to elevator music. So it happens that a foreign minister, lily-white in springtime innocence, faced with a world in flames, shrugs and says that international law matters, but only up to a point. That war criminals are offered state flights, rolled out red carpets, light-hearted allowed to glide through our skies. And it happens that the self-appointed master of the world chisels out a new three-headed Hydra and brands it the Donroe Doctrine: a glossy decree that grants him the right to do whatever he pleases with the world, with bodies, with lands, with rights. This is where art and culture serve as oxygen. Because this is where critical and visionary minds serve as oxygen, reactivating thought and the capacity to live together. The capacity to share. Today we speak about how contemporary art embodies and defends one of the most exposed and indispensable principles of our time: sharing, political and resistance act, a force that holds together bodies, lands, thoughts. Not sharing as a feel-good word for conferences or speeches, but as the right to relation, to dissent, to assembly, to a community capable of listening to every difference. The body and the shelter: sharing in contemporary art. Multi-voiced conversation: 1 Curator, 2 Artists, 3 Gallerists Fabiola Triolo But sharing cannot be told by a single voice, because by its very nature it is plural: it is the right that more than any other destabilizes atomized individualism. For the first time, then, these pages weave together several voices. The choice has been surgical. There is someone who gave this right a name and a theoretical framework, identifying contemporary art as a fertile field of relations and turning it into a conceptual manifesto. There is someone who embodied it by decentring rather than centralizing, moving art from a medieval village to the world’s peripheries, growing through difference, building a luminous cultural rhizome and defending its visionary continuity. And there is someone who interpreted its ultra-contemporary meaning, that of data sharing, in order to unmask its silent apparatus of surveillance. Squares and servers, virus and cure, the body and the shelter. The curator, the gallerists, the artists: three cornerstones of an exhausted, deistic art system, yet, thanks to figures of their calibre, still capable of returning art to what it should be: one of the last outposts where rights are defended for not selling ourselves out, inalienable foundations for staying human. Incipit: Maria Lai, Binding to the Mountain – or the art of sharing «This is what art must do: make us feel more united. Without this, we are not human beings» – Maria Lai It is 8 September 1981 when Maria Lai (Ulassai, 1919–2013) takes twenty-six kilometres of blue fabric and decides to bind together the whole of Ulassai, in the Sardinian hinterland of Ogliastra. The houses and their inhabitants, clinging to Mount Gedili in a theatre of stone, become the protagonists of the first work of Relational Art ever realised. Not a painting, not a sculpture: twenty-six kilometres of cloth, three days of labour, three days of shared gestures, hands, bodies and community. The mayor had commissioned her a war memorial. Lai refused. She declared she wanted to make something for the living, not for the dead. She overcame mistrust by listening, for months, to every relationship that animated the town. Women men children elders. She mapped loves, resentments, alliances. She understood that it was not enough to lay out ribbons: they had to be made to live, modulated according to the bonds running through the village. Where there was affection, she hung su pani pintau, the festive bread. Where there was friendship, a knot. Where there was resentment, only a taut strip of cloth, exposed. On the third day, as night fell, the ribbon finally bound the mountain, the guardian of Ulassai’s memory, the one that legend says collapsed in 1861, crushing shepherds in a cave while miraculously sparing a little girl found with a blue ribbon in her hands. Binding to the mountain was to measure oneself against one’s own history and one’s own capacity for solidarity, to reconnect with nature and memory, not necessarily through reconciliation, but certainly through awareness. A long blue band crossing the town like a suture, passing through houses, tangling in hands, measuring distances, making visible what normally remains unsaid: mutual dependence, the fragility of bonds, the risk of the other. The celebration was political, therapeutic, primordial. Lai did not orchestrate a gesture; she returned speech, stitched wounds, created dialogue, set life in circulation. No audience, no stage, just a community called to expose itself, to become an active subject by declaring through art its willingness to share a belonging, proving that a bond is itself a work of art.
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