Abandono [Abandonment] is a video installation at the Cloister of Silence of the Monastery of Alcobaça. Bernard of Clairvaux said he would learn more in woods than in books, and that the monk would learn more in the shade of a tree than at school, suggesting the contemplation of nature and attention to everyday’s raw surroundings as a means to know the mystery of absolute love.
More than the weight and aesthetic enjoyment of art for art, he sought the enjoyment of the presence of the absolute, that the immateriality of light with its contrasts, the despoliation of the bare walls, and the shapes raising to the heights suggest and provide.
In Abandono it is given to see a fragment of the canopy of an olive tree. A fragment that is comparable to what a human being is to the Universe: he may never understand it or fill at all. A fragment in mutation that is something open, incomplete.