When Angels Talk About Love

In each home, transformed into a ritual space, the contradictory forces of care and violence are invoked, alongside ancestral echoes, love as a state that transforms (itself), and dreams yet to come. Each session is shaped as a space of practice and shared storytelling – spoken memories, words of struggle, oracular gestures, affective offerings, and silent dances that move through the visible and the invisible.

Guided by the question “what if intimacy could be a safe place?”, this performance weaves together the thinking of authors such as bell hooks, Edouard Louis, Alexandre Coimbra Amaral, and Marshall Rosenberg with practices of collective care. It evokes angels not as saviour figures, but as internal, cellular presences whispering other ways of loving – less idealised, more embodied.

Here, love is not just a feeling, but a concrete and subversive action: listening with the body, speaking with responsibility, caring without erasing anyone, allowing oneself to be cared for without fear. The angels in this performance have no wings – they have flesh, they have doubts, they have a desire to learn.

When Angels Talk About Love is a call to imagine, among the ruins of what we have inherited, fairer bonds, livelier relationships, and new possibilities for comm. A small ritual for peace – intimate, collective, radical.

This work arises from a personal process of loss and the attempt to understand: the rupture of a deeply desired family nucleus, the grief over a life project that fell apart, and the deep wish to offer my daughter and the worl another possible vision of “family”: one in which love is manifested as daily practice, not just as promise or ideal.

To work through these questions, I invited close collaborators to join me in this process, bringing with them their own stories of love and violence. Together, we shape a performative response that is, at once, listening, exposure, and an attempt at repair.

— Henrique Furtado Vieira, with Catarina Vieira, Leonor Mendes and Sérgio Diogo Matias

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