Francesco Arena. Searching Pra Chao
Two stones, three letters meeting each other.
In Searching Pra-Chao, Francesco Arena engraves the word “God” upon them—only to leave it hidden. The film follows this slow, ritual gesture, in which matter becomes a site of writing, memory, and silence.
In Searching Pra-Chao, Francesco Arena engraves the word “God” upon them—only to leave it hidden. The film follows this slow, ritual gesture, in which matter becomes a site of writing, memory, and silence.
Reviewed by Beatrice
10. October 2025
Faith begins exactly where thought ends.
(S. Kierkegaard)
(S. Kierkegaard)
Only matter can encounter immateriality.
The gesture becomes a geological reflection, and matter itself turns into a question. God—three letters that coincide with Dio in Italian—splinters, fractures, conceals itself. Not as transgression or prayer, but as an ontological experiment: what remains of God when the word is broken, when the stone becomes the keeper of silence?
The gesture becomes a geological reflection, and matter itself turns into a question. God—three letters that coincide with Dio in Italian—splinters, fractures, conceals itself. Not as transgression or prayer, but as an ontological experiment: what remains of God when the word is broken, when the stone becomes the keeper of silence?
Arena does not seek God in the sky, but within the stratification of time. His “inscription” carved into two slabs—the G and the D separated, the empty space where the O should be—is a gesture as simple as it is vertiginous: absence as a form of presence, faith as a hypothesis that requires the coexistence of doubt. When the two stones are brought together, the missing letter forms only in the imagination, like a god revealed in the very act of negation. The word God remains buried, invisible, as if divinity required burial to truly exist—as if truth could manifest only through concealment.
In this search, stone is no longer a symbol of eternity but of a time that precedes and outlives us. The human being, a fragile vessel, measures itself against the incommensurable continuity of the mineral: we, transient beings who claim to contain God, are instead contained by the world itself, absorbed into its millennial geology. The cyclopean walls—ancient as the memory of the species—become a metaphor for thought’s futile attempt to delimit the absolute.
Searching Pra-Chao is, then, a film about the limits of knowledge and the scandal of faith. Kierkegaard hovers over every frame: the wager on the divine as a leap into the void, the paradox as the only possible form of contact with the sacred. In Arena’s work, God is not a concept but a possibility—a fissure between two stones that align only for an eternal instant. It is the moment when matter opens itself to the enigma, and language dissolves in its own impossibility to name.
What remains is the gesture—a writing entrusted to the earth, an act of trust toward the invisible. Perhaps faith is nothing more than this: to dig, to engrave, to cover—to let time do the rest.
In the end, blind faith is the only kind of faith.
(Mason Cooley)
(Mason Cooley)