Romantic in tone and inspired by José Saramago’s The Tale of the Unknown Island, “Momento”, the first chapter of a Zerogrammi research project, choreographed by Stefano Mazzotta and performed with Amina Amici, suggests a need for connection and tenderness, filled with modesty, reticence, grazing gestures and hands drawing close. The harmony in the dance is complete: soft and delicate, shared steps, a profound concord, an attunement both evident and secret. Valeria Ottolenghi, La Gazzetta di Parma

Momento is the first chapter of the wider choreographic project The Tale of the Unknown Island, freely inspired by José Saramago’s work of the same title. The creation belongs to a path of artistic research into memory, time, its passing, and the emotional and social conditions generated by this relationship.

This initial chapter focuses on our relationship with the present moment, on the suspended and uncertain condition that carries our experiences and memories towards future desires and hopes yet to be realised. What we are is the sum of all our experiences, events and lived emotions; of the knowledge we have accumulated and the lessons we have—or have not—learnt. It is a depth that dwells beneath the soles of our feet.

Yet life is nothing but an eternal present, and existence belongs to the instant: Goethe’s Augenblick, the “moment” in its thirsting search for meaning, within a fluid, metamorphic space that is surface as far as the eye can see, while we float like islands above the past beneath us, submerged under the sea of time.