In 1543 the Lisbon Inquisition sentenced Branca Dias for keeping Judaism in secret. Sixteen generations later, one of her descendants, born in Rio de Janeiro, is returning to Judaism through the Spanish & Portuguese Beth Din in London. These four pieces follow the thread between them.
Bnei anusim means "children of the forced ones": descendants of Jews forced to convert. Each piece below is a playable sketch for an installation.
A single gold thread runs from Viana do Castelo to Lisbon, across the Atlantic to Pernambuco, north to Sobral in Ceará, south to Rio, and back across the ocean to London. Step down the generations and watch the thread travel. The star marks the two women the Inquisition named; after them, the records keep only names.
A single gold thread, hundreds of metres long, is strung across the gallery from a point marked Viana to one marked London. It passes a knot for every generation, each labelled by hand. Visitors walk its length.
After Branca and Inês, no one in the line is recorded as Jewish. The names keep going and the practices disappear from the paper. The thread doesn't break. It only goes quiet until 2024.
From the artist's genealogy, which draws on Cônego Sadoc de Araújo's Cronologia Sobralense and on Inquisition records at the Torre do Tombo. Recent generations are shown without personal details.
Her mother and sister in Lisbon, then her pupils and neighbours in Pernambuco, described Branca's Fridays to the Inquisition as evidence against her: clean sheets, a second wick, a yellow stew of meat and chickpeas sealed in its pot and cooked overnight, and a Torah laid on the bed. Their words are the only record of how she kept Shabbat. Here the accusation is written in ink on linen. Wash it away and the same words turn into instructions.
Lines of white sheets hang like laundry, printed with the denunciations in the original Portuguese. Once a week, on Friday, they are washed and rehung, and each wash leaves the ink fainter. In the corner, a clay pot of adafina cooks from Friday afternoon, and by evening the room smells of cumin and onion.
Branca's daughters and granddaughters said they learned "the law of Moses" from her. What was written down to condemn her has become, four centuries later, her family's Shabbat manual.
Phrases from trial 5736 (Lisbon, 1543) and the Pernambuco denunciations of 1593–1595, as given in Koren de Lima, Branca Dias, Tomo 1. The stew was cooked by uma sua escrava, an enslaved woman whose name the record doesn't keep.
A Recife legend says that when the Inquisition came for her, Branca threw her silver and jewels into a stream, which has been called the Riacho do Prata ever since. The water hid what she couldn't keep. Four hundred years later, her descendant goes into water to return: the mikveh.
A shallow channel of running water crosses the floor. Visitors drop small silver discs into it; each one rings as it lands. At the end of the channel, the water collects in a still pool the size of a mikveh.
It sits between history and myth, and it's been told by poets. Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote about it. The piece treats it as a legend and says so.
The pool evokes the mikveh without imitating the ritual. How close to go is a question for your rabbi.
Two courts, 480 years apart, sit face to face. On the left, the Lisbon Inquisition's case against Branca Dias and her family. On the right, the return of her descendant before the Sephardi Beth Din. Tap each pair to let the second court answer the first.
Two long tables face each other across a narrow room, with documents under glass on each. The Inquisition's side is lit first. Over the exhibition, the lamps on the Beth Din's side come up as the lamps opposite dim.
Branca Dias's trial survives in the Torre do Tombo: PT/TT/TSO-IL/028/05736, 34 folios, 13 September 1543 to 9 July 1545. The real piece would show its pages.
The right-hand side describes a conversion in general terms. It only includes what the artist and the Beth Din are happy to make public.