News of March
Spring brings us to her, Maria Lai, a woman of immense human contours and an extraordinary talent, the Sardinian artist who, first of all, inspired and initiated Lunàdigas’ research work.
Her testimony ideally opens the Live Archive and it was collected during the making of the docufilm: ‘Invented by an absent-minded god. Maria Lai’ by Nicoletta Nesler and Marilisa Piga (2001). Her words, in which she offers us a small recollection of her childhood linked to the place where she lived, to her family, and to her elusive character, a lover of her own independence, sound like a testament of the soul, a precious legacy for anyone wishing to approach an unprecedented, transversal and intimate knowledge of this precious artist who left an unbridgeable void when she died.
Maria Lai, with the profound simplicity of her view of the world, confides that she had a pact with her sister: if she ever had children, she would have them raised by her.
Along with her, we inaugurate the first testimonies of Annotu, the section in our Archive dedicated to contributions around parenthood collected in Sardinian language and its several variants, with the voices of Myriam and Valeria.
For Myriam, a researcher at the University of Cagliari, Sardinian language is not only the language of her profession, but also the language of her heart with which she talks to her two-year-old daughter. In her testimony, Myriam focuses on the experience of Sardinian-language kindergartens and the potential of safeguarding Sardinian-Italian bilingualism.
Valeria reasons on how the context of her family of origin, made up of mothers with many children and absent fathers, may have been subconsciously crucial in her choice not to have children.
New additions also in our International Fund, with the new testimony from a Colombian boy, Andrés who addresses the issue of parenthood and discusses his life experience, including as a gay boy, in the Colombian context. Andrés reflects from a personal and political perspective with respect to the choice of non-parenthood: he suffers from relative pressure from society and governments, particularly on the issue of adoption, in a world characterized by the climate crisis. Andrés does not feel the need to have children of his own but embraces an idea of a nontraditional family that involves living with a group of friends and not necessarily with a partner.
A new Impossible Monologue is that of Dora Maar: interpreted by Michela Sale Musio, the artist with the mighty multifaceted talent, known for years only for being Pablo Picasso’s Muse and companion ─ immortalised in the well-known painting ‘Weeping Woman’ disfigured by weeping while biting a handkerchief ─ tells us of her complicated relationship with him, an oppressive but always loved figure.
In the Sories section, Claudia Mazzilli reads Lia Migale who eplores new family ecologies in her novel A occidente del futuro (La Lepre edizioni, 2022).
