“‘It’s in the cellar under the dining room,’ he went on. ‘I discovered it when I was a child, all by myself. The cellar stairway is so steep that my aunt and uncle forbade my using it, but I’d heard someone say there was a world down there. I found out later they meant an old-fashioned globe of the world, but at the time I thought they were referring to the world itself. One day when no one was home I started down in secret, but I stumbled and fell. When I opened my eyes, I saw the Aleph.’

‘The Aleph?’ I repeated. ‘Yes, the only place on earth where all places are — seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending.’”

    – Jorge Luis Borges, short story ‘El Aleph’








I closed my eyes–I opened them. Then I saw the Aleph.









El Aleph was a transdisciplinary space for culture and the arts established in the city of Porto from autumn 2021 to autumn 2023. As a residency space, it wove together an intentional network of musicians, visual artists, writers, theatre practitioners and philosophers for a laboratory investigation on questions of cosmology, time, space, and ancestrality. Guided by the invitation from the short-story of Borges, ‘El Aleph,’ the founding of the space sought to investigate creation as a relationship between immanence and that which one might still call the infinite, recalling the ancestral and medieval connection between art and the sacred.

astrolabos[at]elaleph.pt