Óru víu means living edge in the dialect of Ulassai, and it sounds like the Italian word for gold. The competition asked for a new Piazza Barigau, the square where the town meets the mountain and where Maria Lai's work is part of the ground people walk on every day. The proposal treats the edge between the built town and the landscape as the place to work: a threshold that stays open and accessible, holds the green areas that already grow there, and lets the square be crossed and used at every hour instead of being framed as a monument.

I followed the project from the first concept through to the submission. The point I kept coming back to was the risk of arriving from above with a finished image: an artwork of that weight and a square people already use daily can both be emptied out by a design that replaces what is there. So the scheme was built on the activities the piazza already hosts and on how the town moves through it, with Maria Lai's work as the matrix the rest is arranged around, and it stays a public space for the people living there