Momento constitutes the first chapter of the broader choreographic project The Tale of the Unknown Island, freely inspired by the work of José Saramago.

The creation forms part of a wider artistic research path centred on memory, time, its passing, and the emotional and social conditions generated by our relationship with it.

This first chapter specifically focuses its inquiry on the relationship with the present moment — 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 and emotions lived through; of the knowledge we have accumulated and of 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 but an eternal present, and existence belongs entirely to the instant: the Goethean Augenblick, the “moment” suspended within a thirsting search for meaning, within a liquid and metamorphic space that stretches like a surface as far as the eye can see, while we drift like islands upon the past lying submerged beneath the sea of time.

“They mistake us for ships, but we are islands.
Intricate, deserted — what treasures
can we offer those who never arrive?
Our coast is harsh. Our lighthouse,
made of voice instead of light,
does not attract — it frightens —
and no sailor lost in the night
will ever touch our shores where still
the footprints hurt of that castaway
who knew our desert.

Night, every night, both promises and denies us
the road back home, the return voyage,
the love that might save us from ourselves
and the word that could be spoken forever.

Within us there are nameless trees
tired of giving shade and growing alone.

Those who never depart yet suffer
from a thirst for cliffs, love harbours,
set sail in sleep, seek another thirst
to quench the first; they observe us,
they see us as ships, happy.

We are islands.”

— Juan Vicente Piqueras