Contemporary culture doesn’t speak in allegories. It plays with them. Similarly to the way in which the children play under the apple trees in that painting by Giovanni Bellini which is both the subject of a new consideration of the sacred by AES+F, and a reflection on the possibility of integrating the work in to the space of contemporary culture.lhe cultural history of humankind has its deepest roots and its most stable foundations in the study of the sacred, linking it with the origin of life and the experience of the necessity of existence as a manifestation of the divine plan which gives meaning to humankind’s earthly journey.

The sacred allegory suggests playing with meanings, which contemporary culture believes to be both secret and obvious. They are the forms and the direction of movement of civilisation, the products of its self-knowledge, its notion of naturalness and normality, its phobias, desires, fantasies and shyness. It names these things forms of life.

‘I am the way and the truth and the life’ says Jesus in the Book of John. Is this why the action takes place in an airport building, there where time passes in anticipation of the way ahead, and who here is talking about truth? There is no truth, no real way ahead and no real events here other than the screen version of reality.

What is contemporary culture? Can it contain sacred, holy and secret meanings or, rather, where is the measure of the real, where are the reservations where these words are filled with actual meaning? Do they exist? Have they been preserved in the dictionary of reality and what is the extent of the description of these territories in the present ? Maybe the journey which people await in the world of the airport is a fiction, substituted with other, unexpressed words and uncompleted actions? The closed nature of the space and the snowbound aeroplanes appears to be a joke at the expense of these people’s means of existence, at the life of the new human being.