Aurélia

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 City Museum and students from Aurélia de Sousa 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, presented to the public between November and February 2023, in the context of the Evocation of the First Centenary of the disappearance of Aurélia de Souza.

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.