Trienal FRESTAS, 2014

Group exhibition
SESC Sorocaba
Curated by Josué Mattos
Sorocaba – Brazil

At the 2014 Trienal FRESTAS, curated by Josué Mattos, Felippe Moraes presented the works Verbo (The Word, 2009–10) and O Peso do Verbo (The Weight of the Word, 2010–14) as a processual diptych unfolding between gesture, time, and matter.

In Verbo, over the course of seven months, the artist carried out a continuous and exhaustive operation: manually removing every occurrence of the word “Deus” [God] from a Catholic Bible. The process, conducted as a pilgrimage with no fixed deadline, called for obsessive attention to typographic variation, meticulous cataloguing, and the acceptance of error as a constitutive part of the experience. Each excised word is reorganized according to its graphic differences, while a final blank page symbolically holds what escaped the eye, instating the presence of the invisible within the system.

In O Peso do Verbo, the set of extracted words undergoes an act of measurement: their total weight, 15 grams, becomes the work’s central unit. This value is then redistributed across 72 glass vessels containing electrically conductive materials, alluding to the 72 names of God in the Jewish mystical tradition. The word, once language, becomes matter; matter, in turn, becomes potential energy. The work evokes an alchemical laboratory in which the word is distilled, materialized, and reconfigured as latent force.

Related text

• Verbo (2009-10) e O Peso do Verbo (2010-14) – Isabella Rjeille