There Is No Understanding Without Images

 When entering the amphitheater we are faced with a huge bamboo scaffolding structure supporting light panels that cover the entire wall. Fluorescent tubes connect either vertically or horizontally, making up visual poems with no apparent relation greater than the luminous line. At a certain point one reads “Não há compreensão sem imagens” (“There is no understanding without images”), the Portuguese adaptation of the Latin phrase Non est intelligere sine phantasmate by St. Thomas Aquinas in his compendium Summa Contra Gentiles: “For the human intellect, although it can know itself, does indeed take the first beginning of its knowledge from without, because it cannot understand without a phantasm, (…)”.
Saint Thomas, and subsequently Ricci considered that human knowledge could only begin through effect, through images, through sensitive realities, through something which is “extrinsic” (to the subject). This philosophical vision combined Aristotelian materialism with the intelligence of faith.