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Pietà of Sorrow - Returning to Providence ✢ a ritual of remembrance

Performance · Video · Installation · Collaborative Ode

An embodied rite of care, presence, and return.

Returning to Providence ✢ Remembering Care is the performance embodiment of the Pietà of Sorrow.
Where the film preserves the myth, the performance lives inside its ephemerality, in breath, in bodies, in shared presence.

The performance explores the ancient meaning of providence ~ to tend, to foresee, to care with the hands of the divine (whether one calls it God, Gaia, spirit, nature, or even yourself). To “return to providence” is to turn back toward the quiet forces that hold us ~ the land, the breath, and the unseen but felt natural rhythms.

Through slow, ritualized gestures, offering pomegranate seeds, tending to cloth, and meeting the audience one by one, the performance opens a space of intimacy and remembrance.
It is a collective rite of re-attuning
to the body as a carrier of memory
to grief as a fertile ground
to imagination as ancestral knowledge
to care as a radical, quiet form of communion

Audience members are invited not to observe but to participate, to enter a circle, to witness their own sensations, to listen to what the body remembers when it softens.

Each performance is different, shaped by the space, the people present, and the unspoken conversations that arise between them.

This is a ritual of returning to the land, to the breath, to one another.

Runtime: 25-35 minutes

Anne Kolbe performance review, written for Het Archief.



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





Exhibitions
press to see the documentation

Pietà of Sorrow, 2025 at Het Archief Rotterdam, NL

Pietà of Sorrow, 2025 at Dockhuis Rotterdam, NL

Pietà of Sorrow, 2025 at Soda Fabriek Schiedam, NL

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







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