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Vera da Costa

textiel , spiritualiteit , residency , proces , performance , omgeving , natuur , Lichaam , installatie , Experimenteel , Dekolonisatie , cross-over , Conceptueel , Community , Audiovisueel , Artistiek onderzoek , Abstract

Vera da Costa is a Portuguese multidisciplinary artist based in the Netherlands. Her practice moves between textiles, installation and performance, exploring how materials, bodies and environments inform one another. At the centre of her work is an interest in world-building: creating spaces that can hold different forms of knowledge, sensation, ritual and encounter.
A central thread of her research is a reflection on her Western European context and the unsustainability of its dominant systems of living, relating and producing. She is interested in how ancestral European knowledge and ways of relating to land, materials and community might be revisited and reimagined within the present. Her research moves between academic study and embodied forms of knowledge, giving space to speculation, intuition and imagination as tools for approaching ways of knowing that have been fragmented, suppressed or forgotten.
Textiles are her primary medium of research. Across cultures, textiles have long functioned as vessels for knowledge, stories, memory and cultural continuity. Through weaving, natural dyeing, manipulation and reuse, she approaches fabric as a carrier of these layers, labour and care. Her study of herbalism informs her use of plants as dyes and a broader approach to making rooted in tending, reciprocity and interdependence.
Her work unfolds through immersive installations bringing together textile, light, sound, natural materials and performance. She approaches materials as collaborators with their own histories and agency, exploring how environments can influence perception, movement and relationships. Across her practice, Da Costa explores how constructed environments can become temporary ecosystems where human, material and more-than-human worlds meet, creating spaces for slowness, connection and alternative ways of gathering and relating.

Pelagic
Pelagic - PELAGIC꩜ is a series of ambient listening sessions in Rotterdam, creating spaces for intentional listening, gathering and presence. This edition took place at Bruidplaats, a community space on a small island surrounded by nature, where the landscape became an important part of the experience. For the spatial intervention, I wanted to translate the fluidity of ambient sound into the physical environment. Hanging textiles moved softly through the space, evoking water, suspension and continuous flow. Natural elements, lace and beads formed a circular portal, a threshold between the physical and the imagined. The portal became an anchor within the space: something to enter through, gather around, listen from or drift towards. Rather than functioning as a backdrop, the scenography was conceived as an environment that could hold the collective act of listening and shift attention towards the body, the surrounding landscape and one another. The work explored listening as an embodied and spatial practice, creating an environment where sound, nature and scenography could blur the boundaries between presence and reverie.
Ternura Radical
Ternura Radical - For Zeedykes’ Pride gathering, themed Radical Tenderness, I was invited to develop the scenography for the entire space. The concept imagined a temporary autonomous queer universe, a secret lesbian revolution unfolding inside a dream. Intimacy, softness, underground romance and tenderness became the guiding principles for transforming the space. Together with Mia Cecille and Lois Forbes, I developed the environment through textiles, installation and spatial interventions. The entrance became a portal into this imagined world. Hand-dyed fabrics in pinks and reds descended from the ceiling into the dancefloor, partially obscuring the space and inviting visitors to move through layers, discover what was hidden and become part of the scenography. Translucent fabrics formed a maze-like landscape, with a suspended tent creating a small pocket for intimacy and retreat. Vintage screens from Zeedykes’ Dark Room Riots video installation introduced fragments of queer cinema and abstract imagery. At the centre, a large temporary tent opened like a flower, gathering people into its soft structure, with a second portal inviting moments of shared silence and contemplation. The scenography became a temporary queer universe, a space for intimacy, imagination and collective presence. Through softness, dream logic and spatial transformation, Radical Tenderness explored tenderness itself as a form of rebellion.
Tending To Rest
Tending To Rest - Tending to Rest emerged from the study of herbalism and plant medicine. The project began with a simple question: how can we create spaces for collective rest? Since then, it has developed into a practice of caring for bodies within communal environments, particularly those shaped by music, nightlife and gathering. Rather than approaching these spaces solely as sites of escape, Tending to Rest considers them places for connection, remembrance, release and collective presence. Where care can become part of how we celebrate and come together. Through ephemeral installations, the project creates small refuges within the intensity of communal gatherings, inviting moments to pause, breathe, ground and reconnect with the body. Alongside these spaces, herbal blends are prepared and shared, offering nourishment and plant-based care during long hours of dancing, listening and collective experience. The project also takes shape through gestures of exchange and gathering, including tea serving, tarot readings, conversations and other forms of intimate care. These offerings are a way of giving back to the communities and spaces that hold us, proposing care not as an individual responsibility but as something we can collectively practice. Tending to Rest moves between intimate gatherings and larger-scale events, adapting to the people and environments it encounters. At its core, the work explores how small acts of nourishment, attention and tenderness can transform the way we inhabit shared spaces, tending to the body, the community, and the relationships that sustain us.
Pietà of Sorrow
Pietà of Sorrow - Pietà of Sorrow is an ongoing interdisciplinary work exploring grief, tenderness, ritual and transformation, and how sorrow can be held both individually and collectively. The work began as a text, an attempt to give language to a particular experience of sorrow and to imagine what it might mean to stay with it rather than overcome it. Gradually it unfolded into a performance and costume. Through embodying the writing, the work moved from language into gesture, material and ritual. As the performance developed, the desire to preserve and transform this world led to the creation of a film. Rather than documenting the ritual, the film became a new way of expanding its world through image, sound, landscape and time. Since then, both shapes have continued to evolve alongside each other, with each form informing and transforming the others. At the heart of the work is the figure of the Pietà (Michaelangelo, 1498-1499) an image of mourning and care, traditionally depicting the grieving mother holding the body of her dead child. The work takes this image as a starting point to consider grief not simply as an experience of loss but as an embodied practice of holding, witnessing and transforming. It asks what happens when we allow sorrow to exist without immediately seeking resolution and how mourning can become a space for connection. Ritual and materiality are central to this exploration. Textile moves throughout the work as costume, skin, shelter and vessel, creating a tactile language for memory and transformation. Bodies, fabric, sound, objects and gesture come together to form an imagined ceremonial space where vulnerability can be witnessed and shared. The work continues to shift according to the context and people it encounters. Today, Pietà of Sorrow exists as an ecossystem of film, installation, performance and conversation. The installation creates a physical environment to enter; the performance activates it through body and ritual; the film offers another temporal and emotional dimension; and conversation opens the work towards collective reflection. Rather than attempting to resolve sorrow, Pietà of Sorrow creates a space in which it can be held, inviting us to consider grief, tenderness and care as shared, embodied experiences.
A Terra que Habito / The land I Inhabit
A Terra que Habito / The land I Inhabit - A TERRA QUE HABITO (The Land I Inhabit) is a performance installation born from an intergenerational encounter, developed through a collaboration with my grandmother, Marta, and a dialogue with the northern mountains of our homeland in Portugal. The work emerged from a period of artistic research in the landscape, exploring the relationship between body, land and ancestry through listening, walking, gathering and ritual. Among ancient slopes, stones, rivers and the remains of Celtic settlements, the landscape became not simply a setting but an active presence, a body carrying traces of those who came before. Through performance and installation, the work moves between inherited memory and lived experience, asking how ancestral knowledge might be encountered through the body, through gestures, stories, objects, care practices and our relationship to the land. My collaboration with my grandmother became a meeting point between generations, tracing what is carried, remembered and transformed between us. The work forms part of a broader research into European ancestry and the possibility of reconnecting with land and with one another through embodied forms of knowledge. It looks beyond dominant historical narratives towards the local, rural and often overlooked relationships between people, landscape, ritual and seasonal life. At its core, A Terra Que Habito considers care as a form of knowing. It asks what forms of belonging become possible when we remember the body as part of an ecosystem < a mountain, a tree, a river, a stone > rather than separate from it. The installation creates a small ritual environment through which these ideas are held: three panels, two chairs, lavender oil, and a hat. Simple objects become carriers of memory, connecting the intimate with the ancestral, and the domestic with the landscape. A Terra Que Habito is an offering to the earth that shapes us, to the hands that came before, and to the gestures that continue to move through us.

Tending to Rest

Datum:
Locatie: Possibilities Open Studio, Dohm, Etape, Afterglow

This project is an ongoing practice of giving back to the dancefloor, not as an escape but a connector. Through installations, herbal tea serving, plant-based care and intimacy, the project brings moments of rest, nourishment and connection into nightlife and communal spaces. It explores how care can become an active part of collective celebration, creating environments where bodies can pause, reconnect and feel safe. It began with a simple question: how can we create space for collective rest?

https://veradacosta.com/tending-to-rest

Pietà of Sorrow

Datum:
Locatie: During the latest period of touring with this project, the work has visited: C3 Sudios, Het Archieve, De Zolder Studios, Dokhuis, Soda Fabriek, IFFR at FENIX, Serendipity Festival India, K:Art Studio UK, The New Studio, Migrant Kitchen
In samenwerking met: This project had the help of Voorderkunst, Het Cultuurfonds, Leve Het Geven and Gemeenten Rotterdam.

Pietà of Sorrow is a multilayered work that exists as a short film, performance, installation, and community gatherings, adapting to each context it inhabits. For some it is a story of birth, for others death, questioning the body as part of the natural world while confronting sorrow, ache, and transmutation. Through symbolisms and movement, living landscapes appear as living paintings, hovering between dreams and reality, through the surreal invites a reflection on what it means to be human.

https://veradacosta.com/main
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