STILL MARIANAS
October 26th | 9:30 p.m.
Location: Lagos Cultural Center – Duval Pestana Auditorium
Org.: Dona Maria II National Theater (National Odyssey) and CM Lagos
Duration: 80m
Class. age: M14
Free entry (ticket collection required)
Event integrated into the National Odyssey program of the Dona Maria II National Theater (Eixo Peças)
April 1972. Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa publish “Novas Cartas Portuguesas”, taking as their starting point the “Cartas Portuguesas”, an epistolary novel published anonymously in 1669, and attributed to the nun Mariana Alcoforado. In “Novas Cartas Portuguesas”, the texts written by the three authors – whose authorship of each one has never, until today, been revealed – address themes as diverse as passion, female enclosure, writing, the feeling of isolation and abandonment, war, making an unequivocal and critical parallel to Portuguese society at the time.
In 1973, the authors would be put on trial by the Estado Novo, which promptly put the censorship machine to work by removing the book from the market on the accusation that it was “insanely pornographic and offensive to public morals”. The Três Marias judicial process (the name by which the writers became known), which only ended on April 25, 1974, had cross-border political and social repercussions, having been dubbed, at the time, as the first international feminist cause by the North American organization National Organization for Women (NOW). In 2022, 50 years later, Catarina Rôlo Salgueiro and Leonor Buescu bring the New Portuguese Letters to the scene, alongside historical documentation from the time, intending to call for reflection around the collective memory of a country, its people and of your time.