Dona Lourdès
Residencies
- 01.06 > 10.06.2023
This project began with conversations I held with my grandmother about her life. From her childhood in Rio to her first emotions, from her white father’s ignorance to her black mother’s pride, from classical dance to samba, from her marriage to her move to Europe, from absence to the gap.
How does my grandmother’s racial history affect me? Her mother, a black working-class cleaning lady, raised her alone while her biological father, the son of a middle-class Portuguese family, never recognised her? Her mother was proud that she was paler than herself?
She touches me because I am white.
Tracing back the threads of a political, visual and intimate history, I become aware that my skin colour is the fruit of the long process of denial of black lives.
How can we put the pieces, the fragments, back together by considering the body as a space in which history is recorded?
Dona Lourdès is this place, this land.
Concept, direction, performance: Némo Camus I Collaboration, choreography and performance: Robson Ledesma I Dramaturgy: Nathalia Kloos I Costume: Miguel Peñaranda Olmeda I Video: Mary Szydlowska I Light design: Nora Boulanger Hirsch I Production: Atelier 210 I Co-production: Atelier 210, Charleroi Danse, Tax Shelter I Supported by La Bellone, kunstcentrum BUDA, Maison des Cultures de Saint-Gilles, Kunstenwerkplaats
Dona Lourdès — A Redenção de Cam (1895) / Orfeu Negro (1959)