Film excerpt

::: CREDITS :::

Project by Filipa Matta, Lígia Andrade, Mafalda Miranda Jacinto, Sara Vieira Marques
Installation by Mafalda Miranda Jacinto, and Sara Vieira Marques
In Collaboration with Youngsters from Amato Lusitano
Co-production: Festival Singular/ Terceira Pessoa
Support: Amato Lusitano
Acknowledgements: Daniela, Mariana, Jorge
Photography: Marta Cost/ Terceira Pessoa

Buço Azul
Audiovisual Instalation

This installation was based on audiovisual material collected during a creative workshop for young people, held in October 2024 at Amato Lusitano, as part of the Singular Festival. It is aimed at a teenage audience and tries to reflect critically and artistically on the themes of gender violence, love and affection.

For these workshops, we have taken Charles Perrault's tale, Bluebeard, which tells the story of a very rich man with a big blue beard that made him look terrifying. Bluebeard was looking for a new wife and, after some insistence, won one of the two sisters he coveted. When he left on a business trip, he left his recent wife a bunch of keys and told her that she “could open all the safes, all the rooms, but she was forbidden to enter only one”. His wife couldn't contain her curiosity and opened the forbidden door, discovering all the bloodied bodies of his ex-wives. Returning home early, Bluebeard discovered this “disobedience” and, enraged, tried to kill his wife with his sword. The heroine survives thanks to her brothers, who arrive and intercede for Bluebeard. Did this woman live happily ever after?

This tale led us to think about the masculine and explicitly violent perspective with which many children's tales are often written: the perspective of the masculine sword, of a cutting, sharp and lacerating object. We thought, Where is the perspective of curved, generative, feminine objects that open doors? Where is the name of Bluebeard's wife? Why couldn't she have defended herself?

Expanding and deepening the objects that seemed central to this tale - the key and the sword - we proposed deconstructing them, and thinking about them from another point of view. Sometimes from a similar point of view - the sword as a masculine object, of men who conquer, but also as an object that mirrors our fears and therefore our strengths. And the key is an object that reveals, that has the power to open and close worlds of new possibilities.

What does your key open?
What fears does your sword reflect?