NUÙ

2025

Collaboration with Sara Persico for Una Boccata d'Arte

Sara Persico, Collective sound library.

Alison Darby: Granite sculpture / 180 × 130 × 40 cm

Curation: Anna Pirisi, Threesproductions
Church of Sant’Isidoro, Burcei, Sardegna

In Sardinian, the word Nodu(or Nuùin the Campidanese dialect) means both rock and knot—a bond. It is this knot that binds Raffaele Urru, a poet from Burcei, to his native village: only the earth can untie it, as in ancient rituals where a knotted handkerchief was buried to seal an unbreakable union. This double meaning guides a profound reflection on the village: stone becomes a symbol of belonging, and voice becomes a code of memory.

Burcei is the child of stone, and its identity echoes through the ancient poetic duels in limba, in is mutetus, passed down orally and preserved in precious audio archives. The mountainous landscape is harsh, lunar, dissolving into cherry blossoms in the valley. Massive stones rooted in the earth bear inscriptions from ancient civilizations: in Sardinia, stone is a foundational element—for building, for marking boundaries, for division, and for communication. The Nuragic civilization spoke to the living and the dead through carved symbols and forms, creating a code—almost a score—that remains legible today.

Stone, song, code, and memory inspire the work of Sara Persico, who once again engages with spaces that serve as both witnesses and amplifiers of emotion. The artist acts as a medium, working with sound as a living material—blending recordings of songs and vocal fragments from festivals, poetic duels, and archives with the voices of the future: those of young people invited to express their connection to the land and community through sound.

The result is a layered, collective sound performance. The ephemeral nature of sound finds its counterpoint in the engraved stone by Alison Darby: an immortal, tangible score—both metaphor of the bond with the earth and a lasting, even technological, tool for reactivating sound. The project offers a renewed bond: between past and present, between voice and form. An audio tape seals the experience, entering the community’s archive. The voice becomes stone, and the stone becomes sound: a living code of an identity in constant transformation.

Text by Anna Pirisi

Fotos by Riccardo Locci