"ad infinitum"
English Version

What snatched Adel Souki was the idea of infinite. Idea that she found in Borges' [I] lecture on the invented histories -- gathered in several versions and editions -- known as "As Mil e Uma Noites" ("Arabian Nights". In Portuguese its verbatim translation is "The One Thousand and One Nights"). The beauty of this name enchanted Borges, for whom "Thousand" is almost a synonymous of infinite, and "Thousand and One", remits to beyond the infinite. Still, according to the Argentinean writer, “the Arabs say that nobody can read the "Arabian Nights" ("The One Thousand and one Nights") up to the end. Not due to boredom, but because of the feeling that book is infinite”. The Arabs say – and Borges reaffirms that: “Arabian Nights is such a vast book that is not necessary to read it, once it is a previous part of our memory.” What enchanted Borges, involved Adel.

The Mil Moradas e Uma ("Thousand Homes and One") are also enrolled in our daily life, in our memoirs, in our bodies – in all our senses. And, as well as the book, this work entangle plots, fantasies, dreams, sadness, happiness, dreams, mysteries and rituals.
And yet, because they don't form a text, they also don't need, and cannot be, read. The Moradas (“Homes”) come from the infinite ideias of Thousand and One hands. They are imagined, dreamed, lived and built by children and youngsters from the city, as well as from the outskirts and rural zones. It was with them that Adel shared her desire of construction of a Mil Moradas e Uma ("Thousand Homes and One"), a project that only makes sense with the collaboration of others, as a collective enterprise. It only makes sense in the change and in generosity of each one that was inclined to accept the challenge of building One home (“Morada”). Just One – besides the other Thousand – built with clay, and reckoning from listenings, appropriations, transformations and detachments. Everything in the plural, but demarcated by singularities, subjectivities.

The Mil Moradas e Uma ("Thousand Homes and One"), definitively don't close. On the contrary, the space - impregnated of voices - is diluted, crossing gates and discovered walls, and it reverberates for the evoked memoirs and recorded in the mud modeling process, used in the construction of the Moradas ("Homes"). The noises, the chats and the comments, which compose the installation, reactivate some roads traveled by the children and youngsters -- and they get here to take us there -- not know exactly where. Voyeurism? I don't think so... looks like one more displacement provoked by the intention of sharing experiences ad infinitum.

Juliana Gouthier
Artist and professor of the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) - Brazil


[I]Borges, Jorge Luís. Sete Noites. São Paulo: Editora Max Limonad Ltda. 1987 (pps. 69–88).