– Elisabetta Masala –

…On Art and Relationships

There are invisible threads that connect people, places, and memories. When art becomes a
shared gesture, it has the power to make those threads visible, weaving them into a common
tapestry. In Sardinia, this power found one of its most striking expressions with Legarsi alla
montagna (Binding to the Mountain), the action that Maria Lai carried out in Ulassai on September
8, 1981.
For one day, the entire village became a collective stage: twenty-six kilometers of blue ribbon tied
together houses, balconies, and eventually the mountain itself—intertwining friendships, grudges,
hopes, and memories in a single gesture. It was a communal ritual that, nearly two decades ahead
of its time, anticipated the international discourse on relational art, later theorized in 1998 by
French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud.

It is in this same spirit that the work of Ilaria Turba takes shape. At MAN, she presents the
exhibition I pani del desiderio (The Breads of Desire). For the artist, art is a tool for listening and
transformation, one that opens up spaces of encounter where individual desires can become
collective. The project began in 2019 in the northern districts of Marseille, with open workshops
where people from diverse backgrounds shaped loaves of bread, entrusting their dreams and
words to shared forms. Baked in a communal oven, these breads evoked an ancient gesture of
closeness, capable of uniting knowledge, stories, and dreams.

Over the years, Turba has collected hundreds of loaves and just as many desires, eventually
arriving in Sardinia, a land where the traditions of ritual breads still thrive during community
festivals. It was here, in the village of Villaurbana, that the project found its symbolic fulfillment:
the breads returned to the fire, transforming into black powder. Not an end, but a rebirth, a
collective act, at once a celebration and a metamorphosis, returning desires to matter and
opening new paths for creation.
If Maria Lai, with her blue ribbon, taught us that art can bind communities and generate new
stories, Ilaria Turba brings that lesson into the present, a time in need of shared desires to envision
the future. At the heart of it all is not the object, but the relationship: the care in every gesture,
the time spent together, the potential for beauty to emerge from encounter, Beauty that belongs
to everyone. As Nicolas Bourriaud writes, “Every work of art would be a proposal to inhabit a
shared world, and the work of each artist a web of relationships with the world—generating
further relationships, and so on, endlessly.”