Momento constitutes the first chapter of the broader choreographic project The Tale of the Unknown Island, freely inspired by the homonymous work by José Saramago. The creation is part of an ongoing artistic research centred on memory, time, its flow, and the emotional and social conditions generated by this relationship.

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

And yet life is nothing other than an eternal present, and existence belongs to the instant: the Goethean Augenblick, the present “moment,” engaged in a thirsty search for meaning, within a liquid, metamorphic space that is surface as far as our eyes can see—while we float like islands above the past beneath us, submerged under the sea of time.

**They take us for ships, and we are islands.

Intricate, deserted—what treasures

can we offer to those who never arrive?

Our coast is harsh. Our lighthouse,

made of voice rather than light,

does not attract—it frightens.

And no sailor lost in the night

will ever touch our shores, where still

the footprints of that castaway ache,

the one who knew of our desert.

Night after night, the night promises us

and denies us the road back, the return journey,

the love that might save us from ourselves,

the word that could be spoken once and for all.

Within us are nameless trees,

weary of casting shade and growing alone.

Those who do not depart yet suffer

from a thirst for cliffs, who love harbours,

set sail in their sleep, seek another thirst

to quench the first—they watch us,

they see us as ships, happy.

We are islands.**

Juan Vicente Piqueras