Aurélia
In 2023, as part of the De Corpo Presente cycle, inspired by Aurélia de Souza's Self-Portrait as Saint Anthony, artist Luísa Mota developed a collaborative project with the Soares dos Reis Museum and students from Aurélia de Souza Secondary School. Through dialogues, games, meditations and presence exercises, the artist proposed an immersion in the body as a space for self-staging, memory and transformation, summoning both the emotional-cognitive and the technological.
The process, which took place over five rehearsal sessions (workshops), sought to open paths to a deeper contact with the ‘interior’ — the mystical, the familiar, the energetic — that constitutes and traverses each person. The experience resulted in three distinct performative moments at the museum, presented to the public between November and February 2023, in the context of the First Centenary of the disappearance of Aurélia de Souza. After these presentations, 2 other moments were created at Aurélia de Souza Secondary School and at the home of both Aurélia and Luísa Mota, Quinta da China.
Based on the multiple echoes of the honoured artist — domestic gestures, political questions, gender fictions and games of self-representation — Luísa Mota's performance became a space for contemporary reactivation, where the bodies present came together to continue, in movement, Aurélia's vibrant legacy.
Stages
| First Contact | First appearance and surprise workshop at Aurélia de Souza Secondary School. First contact of the students with the Crystal Being Character. |
| Gatherings | Discussions and gatherings, meetings at the school and at the artist studio. These meetings were recorded. |
| Moment I | Students as Crystal Beings, clearing of energy at the Museum. |
| Moment II | Second public presentation at the Soares dos Reis Museum, referring to the historic space of Aurélia, with the performance of Luísa Mota's family and the Crystal Beings. |
| Moment III | Third presentation at the Soares dos Reis Museum, featuring the interpretation of artist Luísa Mota, her family and the Crystal Beings. |
| School Invasion | Crystal Beings at Aurélia de Souza Secondary School. |
| Quinta da China | Performance and recording at Quinta da China, the former home of the artist Aurélia de Souza. |
Having commenced the first act with the Crystal Beings, for an energetic cleansing of the Museum space, the second act unfolded in a more intimate manner, as Quinta da China was the place where Luísa Mota, like Aurélia de Sousa, lived and where she still produces her artistic work.
This performative act was a portrait of the celebrated Quinta through its current residents, her own family. Her mother, sisters, daughters, and nieces presented themselves here as a plateau of intersecting lines between space, personalities, karmic inheritances, and feminine energy, creating connections and reflections between the now, the before, and the after.
| Constellation Grid | Energy grids to access unprocessed emotions in the energy fields. |
| Feminine Polarity | Experiments on incantation, invocation of poetry to trigger of unconscious content to emerge. |
| Generational trauma | Generational trauma of the yin elements, via direct bloodlines. |
| Trigger points | To emerge |
Cell in my Bone (2008)
An intuitive work that combines photography, sculpture and performance. It is an attempt to exorcise, at a cellular level, the ancestral karmic ties directly linked to the lineage of women in the family and the experience handed down from one generation to the next. The performance takes place in the artist's parents' house, the Quinta da China, in Porto, that was once the private residence of Porto's prominent painter Aurélia de Sousa.