Feeling Closer To Each Other. An Art-Based Environmental Education From Maria Lai’s Legarsi Alla Montagna

Abstract

Contemporary environmental and social crises expose the limits of a paradigm grounded in separation and human dominion over nature as well as of one man over another. Although ecological and systemic thinking has profoundly challenged this worldview, a decisive gap remains between theoretical knowledge and embodied perception: we often understand interdependence without actually experiencing it. This article investigates how aesthetic experience can help bridge this gap by rendering existing relations perceptible and transforming recognition into responsibility. To address this question, it examines Maria Lai’s Legarsi alla montagna (1981) as an exemplary form of Art-Based Environmental Education in which aesthetic, territorial, social and ritual dimensions converge. Rather than interpreting the work as a landmark of relational art alone, the article reconstructs its genesis, symbolic structure, and spatial-temporal unfolding in order to show how it reconfigures the sensory conditions through which people perceive themselves, others and the more-than-human world. Finally, discussing the features and the effects of this event, the article proposes aesthetic education as a practice of recognizing the existing relations and cultivating perceptual proximity in order to unlock new possibilities of exchange and care.