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Pietà of Sorrow - The Temple

 Performance · Film · Installation · Collaborative Ode

A nomadic space for sorrow to rest.

The textile temple is the home of Pietà of Sorrow, a living installation where grief, memory, and tenderness are held with care. At its core lies the Pietà, not as a static icon of mourning, but as alchemy and transmutation. The work asks how the body remembers, how gesture and symbol speak beyond language, and how materials can shape a safe space for what is difficult yet essential to hold.

To meet these questions, the Pietà needed more than a stage or screen.
She needed a vessel, a threshold the audience could cross, entering her world through fabric, light, and stillness.

The temple emerged from this need.

Its walls are draped in inherited fabrics from Vera’s great-grandmother and grandmother, alongside cloths dyed during ritual performances with living pomegranate pigment. Each textile carries its own lineage: skirts once sewn in an atelier, curtains that held light for decades, cottons that continue to shift with temperature, sunlight, and time. Together, they create a space where the intimate becomes collective, where echoes of sorrow, beauty, and remembrance can resonate and meet.

Here, grief is sacred. The tender, the broken, and the vulnerable are not flaws but forms of truth, held in compassion.

In every exhibition, the temple reshapes itself. Agency is given to the materials, the architecture, the context, and the moment. The artist listens, translates, and builds what the fabrics themselves ask to become.




some images, check the exhibition list down below for more documentation.





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