Pietà of Sorrow
2022–2025Performance · Video · Textile Installation · Collaborative Ode
The Pietà of Sorrow is a myth in motion - a living ritual that traces the incarnation of creativity into the human form. At once personal, now collective. The work was born from a trance-written prayer and unfolds across disciplines: performance, short film, textile installation and photography. It is both a spiritual offering and a mythopoeic narrative.
At the heart of the project stands the Pietà - not in her classical image of mourning, but as the divine womb, the embodiment of creative force becoming flesh. As she moves through landscapes veiled in translucent fabrics, she explores the terrain of embodiment: sensation, memory, grief, and joy. Her body becomes a site of becoming, constantly shifting between what is held and what is released. This work is part of an ongoing research practice exploring how embodied and intuitive processes, such as ritual, performance, and material-based making, can help reconnect us to lost ancestral and land-based knowledge. It asks how the body remembers, how it speaks through gesture and symbol, and how it can access forms of knowing beyond language.
The Pietà reclaims the pomegranate ✢ psyche made fruit ✢ in a ritual act of sacred liberation. She longs not only for what has been lost but also for what was never fully known. It is a myth of return and remembrance, a hymn to sorrow and transformation, to joy, to the beauty of being spirit bound in skin.
The project speaks to a collective longing: a *saudade* of the soul, echoing through generations and across bodies. It weaves together grief and creation, not as opposites, but as complementary forces. In this work, sorrow is not only mourned, it is witnessed, honored, and transfigured into beauty.
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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
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
Making
Through meditation and automatic writting the project is born into an ode. By using it as a mantra, the words dissolve into rythm and resonance. Here an immage arrises. At first a triangle, and as I sit with this vision it takes shape into the Pietà from Michaelangelo. However there isn’t Jesus on her lap, but two pomegrantes. 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 coffe, teas, natural elements. As I sit in front of the sweing 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 isnt tied by time and context and can be tranlated endlessly. So I call in other creatives, women and gender non conforming people. I invite them to relate to the Pietà beyond me, and within themselves. I ask how does she take shape in their lives.
The Pietà is now a meeting ground, for us and for you. Where there is space for each ones 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.
Exhibitions
In Primary Things, Still Life,2023 Grote of Sint Janskerk Schiedam
Kill your Darlings, 2023 at TENT Rotterdam
Pietà of Sorrow - WDKA GradShow, 2025 at C3 Studios Rotterdam
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 (12–15 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
Colourist - 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
Producer - Beatriz Felicio @biaodesagradavel
Director of Photography - Mia Ferreira @thespacecaveman
Scoring & Sound Design - Xaos @translucidal_chaos
Editor - Anastasia Goncharova
Colourist - 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
BTS
Based between Netherlands and Portugal
Contact
email - veramachadodacosta@gmail.com
instagram - Vera da Costa
Contact
email - veramachadodacosta@gmail.com
instagram - Vera da Costa