INTERIOR

Sometimes when I feel my body I have the impression that only I feel this way, that this experience is mine alone, and the sensations so particular they are indescribable. When Maria asked me to translate the text of this book — because Juliana wanted a woman to do the work and because she thought we might share similar sensibilities — she simply told me the text was a journey through bodily sensations, from the mouth to the anus.

And I found myself in a choreography traced by her descriptions, repeating movements to really understand the text, translating words into gestures: licking my palate to explore the roughness of its dome, closing my ears to listen to the air inside my skull, groping my breasts to uncover their internal architecture, sticking my finger in my navel to feel its scar tissue. As in her sculptures about movement, Juliana Cerqueira Leite transforms the reader's body into sculpture, and movement (internal, in this case) into language.

I read the text before seeing the drawings, and when I finally saw them, it felt like I was seeing something out of a vaguely remembered dream, as if they were coming from within me all of a sudden, inoculated by the text. The 22 images, which literally unfold into each other, explode with colors and stimuli; they are truly sensory, they make you salivate. Maria says that the relationships between the drawings were not planned beforehand, which makes the harmony in the dialogues generated as one turns the pages even more fascinating. They are combinations of chance—or not so much, since the path is traced by the internal trajectory of the female body. And so, naturally, each thing unfolds into the next: sensations that vary in shape and magnitude, just like the drawings, made in different sizes and reproduced to scale. Drawings of which only one half can be seen as you go in, and the other half on your way back out, "as if [the] body was actually two bodies vertically mirrored, doubled."*

Because it is joined together by a mobile elastic band, the book takes on a movement of its own, like the limbs or organs of a body that, even when still, moves on the inside as it carries out its vital processes. A body that remains structured by its spinal column, which supports the miscellany of this ecosystem with its logical organicity. The spine receives its tribute, pampered by the hands of the artist, who massages the book’s spine and imprints the movement of her fingers on an embossed cover for the 25 copies of the special edition, and printed with ink on the other copies of this limited edition of 250 copies.

At the center of it all, like a heart, is a facsimile of the notebook in which the artist describes all those indescribable sensations, making her experience mine, yours, ours.

*From the notebook of Interior, Juliana Cerqueira Leite

Dandara Catete, Artist and Translator