Sherif and Silvie Defraoui, Lisbon, Galeria Quadrum
April, 1978

The language should communicate
the world to the other

Derrida

The Defraoui work on the memory and on the memory of the memory: They do not say anything that goes beyond themselves "like a fear of the oblivion". But this memory, all memory of the world is a paradigm of to be, a predication that is a violence directed to the absolutely other. It does not see it, it does not touch it, it does not hear it, cannot even conceptually think of it, but it aims at it or goes to it and arranges a place for the memory. Violently and inexorably. The formal tautology face to face with the empirical heterology. This strange dialogue even when we think of it as if were checking the places of memory and of time archetypes of a metaphor that always faids it is nevertheless the vital dialogue the only constitutive of the face of the height

... and your body is also a place
of memory, I could say Nuria
that I love you, this would be
a way (the shame of nudity) to
leave the anguish: your body
is my body. Can you stop your
memory with superficial words
(shame of the sentence)?
that would almost be an unlimited
exercise

the absence and the
fear of oblivion the I as the You
the individual memory
as the collective memory
body but head
necessary height.

yes our meeting
is a metonymy metaphor of
renouncement

besides the work and its liturgy assure
that the non-work
is still to come

epiphany of all epiphanies
meanwhile
their memory has perished with noise
in spite of fear
and of all violences

I look at the eyes of that young
woman in an old photography
it happened in Alpalhão