In these twelve adages — the text does not always follow the image — Alexandre Delmar offers us the time of the images as the text for their reading. These images exist as an oracular proof of a vicinity that does not judge knowledge, but rather indicates it as the harmony of an aphorismatic bar of possibilities and resilience.

That which is repeated for long, sets. Said and stated, adage or aphorism. It is like water slowly flowing through sand, indefinitely. The sea we write and writes us. A writing of the stones, rather than a writing on the stones.

Alexandre Delmar’s Adagiário exists in the space of this potency of the image. Persistent and ambivalent, it establishes not the firm and seemingly acquired nature of answers, but rather its opposite, the fragile and soluble nature of the materials. It effects a maxim in tempo.

Fragility and resilience are the essence of the adage and the gesture that prefigures a composition that seeks not to hide or reveal, but to enable an understanding within soluble dialogues.

In fifteen minutes, this cinematographic cartography develops as a tool to observe a resonance between possible and presumed understandings of our modes of inhabiting time and space, finally subjected to a wisdom of ancestral vitality in which only the world can assert itself as language.

The essay becomes a lexicon of a fiction for the real, and its script is this arrhythmic sequence, with no pretension of form, but rather a desire to exist in that same moment when we grasp for ways of talking with birds.

Text by João Terras