“I didn’t grow up speaking Sardinian. My parents made a choice, a rational one, from where they stood. They believed that Italian was the language of the future, of education, of opportunity. That raising their children in Sardinian would mark us as peasants, hold us back, make us targets. They were trying to give us a better life. They were themselves products of a system that had taught them, convincingly, that their own language was an obstacle.

Nobody taught me the language of my home. The one my illiterate grandmother spoke. The one I couldn’t use to talk to her because I didn’t understand it. My parents thought they were protecting me. They were also, without knowing it, cutting me off from my own people. That loss doesn’t go away.

Spaciada sa Bregungia moves from that personal wound outward, through history, through politics, through the specific and ongoing ways a land and its people get diminished. It is not a gentle piece.”

No More Shame (Spaciada sa Bregungia ) was the winner of one of the two Overall Audio prizes at HearSay International Sound Arts Festival 2026

Created, spoken, produced, edited and mixed by M. Cristina Marras

Voices: Shepherd — Gianfranco Bitti; D.H. Lawrence — Romeo M. Minutolo

Murra players recorded live at the Sardinian Murra Championship, Urzulei, Sardinia

Music: Art of a Dead Man by Shadows; Under the Skin by Semo; The Fall (instrumental) by Or Chausha. All music licensed via Artlist.