Women artists in Brazil and Italy: the relational space in the art of Lygia Clark and Maria Lai

The communication examines the work of two artists, Lygia Clark (1920-1988) from Brazil and Maria Lai (1919-2013) from Italy, using the concept of art as a space of relationship as analytical key. Women artists in very different time-space environments and contexts such as the Brazilian one of Neo-concretism for Clark (with a collective and collaborative environment) and the relatively 'solitary' Italian art environment for Lai, they nevertheless develop artistic practices that share the idea of art work as a common construction. Based on anthropology, their art practices as nexus and ritual, weaving communal identities on internal (individual) and external lines (collective). The three-dimensional sculptures, the organic lines and the eye-body of Lygia Clark as well as the little loaves, the looms and the woven books of Maria Lai - and above all her great participatory action of 1981 Binding to the mountain – step away from the monumentalization spaces of art as well as from abstraction and ‘modernism’, to reunite relationship, places and individual/collective memory within the artistic work / action. For both artists the works are 'living organisms', active presences, almost transitional objects to create / reiterate social bonds, build new bodies, in an era - from the 60s to the 80s both in Italy and in Brazil - characterized by rapid and often culturally depleting processes of social modernization.