Felippe Moraes
Verbo (Word), 2009 – 2010
Catholic Bible, paper, and glue
29.7 × 21 cm (each of 60 sheets of paper)
45 × 30 cm (Bible)
Verbo, 2009 – 2010
The work Verbo (2009–2010), by Felippe Moraes, is an investigation into language, spirituality, and the materiality of the word. It begins with a simple, radical gesture: manually removing every occurrence of the word “Deus” (God in Portuguese) from a printed Catholic Bible.
Over the course of roughly seven months, the artist carried out a continuous process of reading, identifying, and cutting out this word throughout the entire book. The result of this procedure is a physically transformed Bible and a set of paper fragments recording each occurrence of the word.
In total, 5,101 occurrences of the word “God” were identified and cut out, later gathered together and weighed. The final weight of the collected fragments — 15 grams — becomes a central piece of data in the work O Peso do Verbo (2014), developed later, establishing a direct relationship between language, matter, and measurement.
Through this procedure, Verbo turns a theological concept into a material experiment: the weight of the word that names the divine.
Durational Process
The making of the work unfolded as a prolonged, repetitive process, described by the artist as a kind of pilgrimage. Over seven months, every page of the Bible was carefully examined to locate and remove the word “God.”
Along the way, typographic and graphic variations emerged that required specific solutions. Some occurrences appeared in italics, others in all caps or in different font sizes. In certain cases, the word was split across two pages.
To handle these differences, a cataloguing system was created based on the graphic characteristics of each occurrence. The fragments were organized into categories such as “smaller letters,” “italic,” “all caps,” or “split words.”
The process also accepts the possibility of error. As a human, exhausting gesture, the work admits the chance that some occurrence may have gone unnoticed. This possibility is built into the work through a final sheet titled “invisible and unnoticed”, representing the possibility of a word left unseen.
The work’s title refers directly to the prologue of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This passage establishes one of the work’s conceptual foundations, drawing language and creation together.
The idea that the word holds creative power appears across many spiritual traditions. By isolating and gathering thousands of occurrences of the word “God,” Verbo turns this symbolic dimension into a physical object, bringing language, theology, and material experience together.
From Word to Weight
After the cutting process was completed, all the fragments were gathered and weighed. The result, 15 grams, becomes a fundamental element of the work.
This number is not meant to represent the divine itself, but rather to expose the impossibility of measuring it. The gesture of weighing the word reveals a tension between human systems of measurement and that which, by definition, exceeds any attempt at quantification.
The work thus reveals a kind of productive failure: in trying to measure the immeasurable, it exposes precisely the limits of our systems of knowledge.
The Origins of O Peso do Verbo (2014)
The value obtained at the end of the process directly gave rise to a second work by the artist: O Peso do Verbo (2014).
In this later work, Felippe Moraes uses the same weight obtained in Verbo as the basis for an installation made of electricity-conducting materials. The work expands the investigation begun in the first piece, turning the word into matter and exploring relationships between language, alchemy, and energy.
In this way, Verbo functions as the conceptual and methodological starting point for a later work that extends its questions into the field of installation and spatial experience.
Verbo (2009–2010) and O Peso do Verbo (2014) at the solo exhibition Imensurável, CAIXA Cultural Fortaleza, 2018.
Selected Exhibitions
- 2018 – Imensurável – CAIXA Cultural Fortaleza (Ceará, Brazil)
- 2015 – A Escala Humana – Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo (Montevideo, Uruguay)
- 2014 – FRESTAS Trienal – SESC Sorocaba (São Paulo, Brazil)
- 2010 – Ateliê Fidalga no Paço das Artes – Paço das Artes (São Paulo, Brazil)