On Thursday, May 7, at the Monastery of Saint Saviour in Jerusalem, the exhibition "I, Brother Francis" was inaugurated, a display dedicated to the life of the Saint of Assisi. This initiative, strongly promoted by the Custody of the Holy Land, aims to create a meeting place between Saint Francis and anyone curious about his figure.
In order for there to be no mediation in this encounter with the Saint, it was decided to let him speak directly: the common thread of the exhibition is, in fact, the texts written by Francis himself in the Testament that he left to his brothers shortly before he died.
The words of Francis are accompanied by the works of Sidival Fila, a Brazilian artist and Friar Minor living in Rome. Sidival works with fabrics and fibers, evoking an element very familiar to Francis: his father, Pietro di Bernardone, was indeed an important cloth merchant.
Sidival’s working method is particularly significant: he puts the fabric under tension, tears it, sews different fabrics together, and joins heterogeneous materials. This artistic process metaphorically represents God's work in Francis’s life. Just as the artist works with fabrics, so God works in our existence: creating tension, sometimes tearing, other times sewing with patience, uniting our attempts and our fragilities into a larger design.
