Abbecedario, from the late Latin abecedarius, abecedarium - named after the first four letters of the alphabet - designates by definition a booklet for learning to read and write. Ruben Montini's abecedarius, large ‘open’ cases in which hand-painted acetate sheets, flowers and textile sculptures (portraits of the artist and other people from the LGBTQIA+ community) meet, do not teach us how to read or write, but invite us to confront homosexuality.

Every letter, every sentence, every insult is therefore the memory of a direct experience that the participants of the Pale d'Altare project (2021 - in progress) have lived in first person: since 2021 Montini, in every country of the world, has involved the LGBTQIA+ community in witnessing the experience of discrimination suffered on their skin and in the realisation of textile artefacts that tell it through the use of clothes soaked in lived life and cut out to compose sentences.

From a formal point of view, these abbecedari are created using a technique reminiscent of that of the amanuensis: just as the Benedictine monks recopied ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts by hand, so Montini with his collaborator Mattia Ozzy B., using markers, paints, glass enamels and liquid lead, traced onto acetate sheets portions of the altar pallets on a 1:1 scale, which they then placed in the showcases, superimposing them one on top of the other in a short-circuit of colours and languages from different nations of the world.

The flowers - present in the abbecedari - bear the same inscription as the artist's floral sculptures: ‘Take these flowers and offer them to all the homotransphobia victims and targets in our society’.