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Pietà of Sorrow

2022–2025
Performance · Film · Installation · Collaborative Ode

Pietà of Sorrow is a myth in motion. A living ritual moving through film, performance, textile installation, and embodied research. Born from a trance-written prayer, the project traces how creativity incarnates into the body, shifting between the intimate and the collective, the material and the symbolic.

At its center stands the Pietà, not as an image of mourning, but as the divine womb, the force of creation becoming flesh. Through this figure, the project explores embodiment, memory, grief, and transformation, asking how the body remembers what history has forgotten or erased. It is work rooted in decolonial methodology, intuitive processes, and a return to land-based and ancestral ways of knowing.


The Film

The short film follows the Pietà through translucent landscapes, where gesture, fabric, breath, and ritual become carriers of knowledge. It weaves together sorrow and beauty, grief and creation, offering a meditative, mythic narrative.
→ About the film


The Performance

The live performance, Returning to Providence ~ a ritual of remembrance, brings the Pietà into embodied presence. Through offering, touch, and shared stillness, the work becomes a collective act of returning to care ~ for the self, the land, and the natural cycles that hold us.
→ About the performance


The Temple

The project is housed within its textile installation: a shifting temple of inherited fabrics and pomegranate-dyed cloths that respond to sunlight, temperature, and time. A space of softness, memory, and permeability ~ a site where the work can be witnessed with the body as much as with the eyes.
→ About the temple

Across all its forms, Pietà of Sorrow speaks to a shared longing, a saudade of the soul. It is a hymn to remembrance, to care, to the beauty of being a spirit bound in skin.








The Pietà of Sorrow
Folded in self-pity
Oh.. to feel love and depth
when embeded within you is the darkest of sorrows
the unbearable loss of self
a grief, for I have passed

I, this empty vessel
I, folded in self-pity
I, bare of my essence

At last I'm free from joy
the one that binds you to this reality
I'm free to roam the unnamed
guided by lucidity and the winds

I neglect his experience
for this one is mine
unsharable
undividable
solely mine



Photography









Exhibitions
press to see the documentation

Pietà of Sorrow, 2025 with Funds4Talude at Hostel Ani & Haakien Rotterdam, NL

Pietà of Sorrow, 2025 with K:art Studio at Pie Factory Margate Gallery, UK

Pietà of Sorrow, 2025 at Het Archief Rotterdam, NL

Pietà of Sorrow, 2025 at Dockhuis Rotterdam, NL

Pietà of Sorrow, 2025 at Halloween Minerals Berlin, G

Pietà of Sorrow, 2025 at Soda Fabriek Schiedam, NL

Pietà of Sorrow, 2025 at De Zolder Studios Rotterdam, NL










The Pietà of Sorrow is composed of four main elements:
– An immersive temple installation, using soft fabric and sculptural forms to host the viewer in her own world.
– A live performance (20 min), staged as an ephemeral, immersive, and ceremonial event.
– A short film (17 min), offering a meditative and visual extension of the performance's world.





Team

Performer & Director - Vera da Costa @aloeveramc
Producer - Beatriz Felicio @biaodesagradavel
Director of Photography - Mia Ferreira @thespacecaveman
Scoring & Sound Design - Xaos @translucidal_chaos
Editor - Anastasia Goncharova
Colorist - Valentina Rivial @valentinarivial_
Graphic Design - Inês Lobo-Inverno @loboinverno.jpg
Runner/BTS - Rosa Pereira @__rosa_pereira
Runner/ BTS 2 - Leonor Bettencourt
Production Assistant - Mariana Aragão




Making

Through meditation and automatic writing, the project is born into an ode. By using it as a mantra, the words dissolve into rhythm and resonance. Here an image arises. At first a triangle, and as I sit with this vision, it takes shape into the Pietà from Michelangelo. However, there isn’t Jesus on her lap, but two pomegranates. As i look into her eyes i notice the red tears, down her face, tainting her gown.
I am met with a knowing that I need to embody her.
So I start making her gown, dyeing the fabrics with coffee, teas, and natural elements. As I sit in front of the sewing machine, I ask my late great-grandmother to come join me.

A pomegranate. A cape. A body. The performance exists.

As I meditate with her and her story, I know I need to break out of the ephemerality of this performance into something that isn't tied by time and context and can be translated endlessly. So I call in other creatives, women and gender nonconforming people. I invite them to relate to the Pietà beyond me and within themselves. I ask how she takes shape in their lives.
The Pietà is now a meeting ground, for us and for you. Where there is space for each one to bring in their experience, no contradictions, just complementations.

A pomegranate. A cape. A body. A performance. A community. A film exists.

To host it, a temple is created. The walls are layered in fabrics. Passed on from generation to generation. Manipulated with the natural world. A tent to host space for the viewer to meet the Pietà intimately within a communal space.






BTS










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Based between Netherlands and Portugal
Contact
email - veramachadodacosta@gmail.com
instagram - Vera da Costa