From 8 May to 4 June 2026, BUILDING BOX presents the fifth appointment of the exhibition project Per filo e per segno. Percorsi di arte tessile in Italia, dedicated to Maria Lai (1919-2013). The artist is presented with two emblematic works from her research: Telaio (2006) and Libro rosso (2009), understood as complementary testimonies to a poetic universe of great expressive force.
On one side, the procedural logic of the work Telaio manifests itself in the creation of a magic machine, traversed by threads destined to create unstable geometries, through the use of diagonal lines, parallel bundles or intersections; on the other side, from the work Libro rosso, a mental writing emerges that hides in silent pages, traversed by tangled and suspended threads.
"Essere è tessere" emphasizes Maria Lai, based on the constitutive principle of all her artistic making. The loom, the millennia-old tool of weaving, already appears in a drawing made by the artist in the 1940s and, since the second half of the 1960s, becomes a sculptural exercise in continuous evolution, which each time absorbs different elements from the landscape, as well as from painting.