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Pietà of Sorrow

Performance · Film · Installation · Collaborative Ode

A myth of remembrance, held in motion.

Pietà of Sorrow is a poetic short film that follows the Pietà as she moves through otherworldly natural landscapes veiled in translucent fabrics. Neither religious nor literal, the film reimagines the Pietà as a divine womb ~ the force of creation entering the human body. What unfolds is a meditation on embodiment: sensation, memory, grief, and joy. How grief becomes movement, how memory lives in gesture, how beauty emerges from what we allow ourselves to feel. Her body becomes a site of becoming, constantly shifting between what is held and what is released. 

Filmed as a ritual, the work explores embodied knowledge beyond comprehension. It is part of an ongoing research exploring how embodied and intuitive processes, such as ritual, performance, and material-based making, can help reconnect 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.
Each frame holds the tenderness of something remembered and something still becoming. The camera follows the body as a site of knowing, storing, transmuting, and releasing what has been inherited, forgotten, or longed for.

The Pietà reclaims the pomegranate ✢ psyche made fruit ✢ in a ritual act of sacred liberation. Here the fruit materializes, surrendering death and rebirth, the duality of the harsh exterior and soft interior. Their red stains mark the fabric of her body, becoming traces of a shared lineage. 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. 

Rather than asking the viewer to interpret, the film invites them to feel, to slow down, breathe, and witness themselves mirrored through another. In this cinematic offering, sorrow is not only mourned; it is recognized, honored, and transformed into beauty.



Runtime: 17.25 minutes
Format: HD Film, Color, Stereo
Only available to watch IRL and exhibitions-


Still Frames of the Film





Exhibitions


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 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




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