SYNOPSIS “M E N I N A S is an interdisciplinary community artistic project betweenPerformative Arts (Dance) and Photography, comissioned byContemporary Ballet of the North in collaboration with the Santa Cruz do Bispo Prison, with conception, artistic direction and choreography byJoana von Mayer Trindade, whose broad objective is to promote artistic creation, human formation and the development of personal, social and cognitive skills of the female inmates, and the final objective is the creation of an artistic object that is transforming and emancipating, starting from landscapes that oscillate between the real, the natural, the geometric and the chaotic, an objective that would never be feasible without the generosity of each of the women who are exposed in it. The photographic work M E N I N A S, precedes and accompanies the performative work with the same name, with presentations at the Portuguese Center of Photography on July 19 and 20 2014. I invite you to make a circuit of reflection between the photography exhibition and the show. Both function as autonomous objects, but thought and realized as a whole capable of provoking questions related to the intrinsic relation between a second of movement and a second of image, to the ephemerality of the performing arts and to the capacity of eternalization of photography, within the paradigm and device both spatial and contextual that is nowadays a prison." Joana von Mayer Trindade

"Starting from a central nucleus, the choreographic work of Joana Von Mayer Trindade with the inmates of the Special Prison Establishment of Santa Cruz do Bispo, my photographic journey extends into three axes: - intensive follow-up of the creative process of these women, - the direct work with the inmates, looking at the portrait and the self-representation, - the representation of the Prison Establishment as the bark building of a frenetic internal motor, from the synapses that will derive from this crossing of stimuli results a photographic work, still open, where I intend to reflect on the processes of creation as an empowering agent for all those who participate in it, hoping, as always, to find new creative paths in my area and add value to the construction of an artistic project so that others can receive and process it. " Silvana Torrinha