13 Alfinetes

BoCA Bienal, Lisboa, 2025

For 13 Alfinetes, a film by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, I created a large-scale scenic painting, measuring 16 metres in length, conceived specifically for the film. Inspired by Goya’s frescoes on the dome of the Hermitage of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid, the work reinterprets the scale and immersive composition of the original painting within the cinematic space.

“Commissioned by BoCA, 13 Alfinetes is the new film by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, a work of fiction that intertwines devotion, desire and spectres. Inspired by a miracle attributed to Saint Anthony and filtered through the filmmakers’ restless gaze, the film draws on a legendary episode to construct a contemporary narrative about faith, revenge and disillusionment. > > The narrative unfolds across overlapping geographies and periods: from medieval Lisbon, where it all begins, to eighteenth-century Madrid, reflected through Goya’s paintings, and finally to present-day Lisbon, where miracles no longer happen — or perhaps have simply taken on another form. With an ironic and deeply sensual gaze, 13 Alfinetes explores the place of the sacred in a secularised world, staging the persistence of myths and the impulses that sustain them. > > Shot between Lisbon and Madrid, the film is also an exercise in baroque cinephilia, where the theatricality of gesture, the exuberance of spaces and the tension between the visible and the hidden create a ritualistic and profane atmosphere. The title refers to an old Madrid practice of love sorcery, evoking an intimate and violent dimension of faith as both body and fiction.”

13 Alfinetes, 2026, 61 min.

13 Alfinetes, 2025. 1600 × 310 cm