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 | First public presentation at Soares dos Reis 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. |
| constellation grid | energy grids to access unprocessed emotions in the energy fields |
| feminine polarity | generational trauma of the yin elements, via direct bloodlines |
| generational trauma | experiments on incantation, invocation of poetry to trigger of unconscious content to emerge |
| trigger points | to emerge |