How A Costela de Lilith is preserving the invisible history of the Holy Spirit through the voices of the women who have always sustained it
There are histories that fill libraries and archives, and there are histories that survive only because someone remembers. They are passed from grandmother to granddaughter, whispered while bread is kneaded before dawn, exchanged between neighbours preparing a feast, or recalled at the end of a long day when the work is finally finished. They rarely appear in official documents. They seldom receive monuments or commemorative plaques. Yet without them, entire civilizations would quietly disappear. Such is the history of countless Azorean women whose labor, faith, endurance, and quiet leadership have sustained the Holy Spirit celebrations for generations. Their names have often remained absent from the formal record, but their hands have been everywhere. Today, through the artistic vision of Liliana Janeiro and her project A Costela de Lilith, those invisible lives are finally beginning to claim their rightful place within the cultural memory of the Azores.
The short documentary Domingo a Domingo: As Mulheres do Espírito Santo da Calheta did not set out merely to document a religious tradition. Instead, it asked a deeper question: who has quietly sustained one of the greatest symbols of Azorean identity while history looked elsewhere? Premiering in São Jorge, the film became something far greater than a local production. It became an invitation to reconsider the very architecture of memory itself. Viewers responded not only with emotion but with stories. After every screening came another forgotten name, another family memory, another account of women who had quietly challenged customs, organized celebrations, preserved traditions, and expanded their roles within a centuries-old institution that had long been understood as predominantly male.
Those reactions revealed something profound. The twelve-minute film was never enough because the story itself refused to remain contained. Every conversation opened another door into the collective memory of São Jorge. Questions emerged that had rarely been asked before. Who organized the famous “jantarinho das meninas”? Who was the first woman to lead certain prayers? How did women gradually move from supporting roles into positions of greater participation within the Holy Spirit festivities? Each answer uncovered another layer of a history that had survived almost entirely through oral tradition. The documentary’s greatest achievement may therefore have been its ability not simply to tell a story, but to awaken hundreds of others waiting patiently to be heard.
Liliana Janeiro understands that preserving culture requires more than recording rituals. It requires preserving the human beings who have quietly shaped those rituals across generations. Through A Costela de Lilith, founded in 2021 as an extension of her master’s work in Community Theatre, she has developed an artistic movement dedicated to empowering women by transforming their lived experiences into theatre, poetry, documentary film, and collective artistic creation. Her work occupies a fascinating space where scholarship meets performance, where oral testimony becomes dramatic narrative, and where forgotten lives become visible once more. The project reminds us that culture is never static; it is continually rewritten by those who dare to tell stories that previous generations overlooked.
The name itself is deeply symbolic. Lilith has long occupied a contested place within mythology and religious tradition, often representing female independence, resistance, and voices that refused silence. By invoking her, the project signals that its purpose is not confrontation but restoration. It seeks to restore women to narratives from which they have too often been absent—not because they lacked importance, but because history frequently privileged public authority over quiet perseverance. In the Azores, where community life has long depended upon cooperation and mutual support, this restoration becomes particularly meaningful. Every Holy Spirit feast has always required countless women whose work unfolded largely behind the scenes: preparing food, organizing households, maintaining traditions, transmitting customs, raising families, and ensuring continuity. Their contributions were never secondary. They simply remained largely unnamed.
What makes the project especially compelling is its understanding that community theatre is not merely performance but participation. In São Miguel, Flores, Faial, and São Jorge, workshops have brought together women from remarkably diverse backgrounds—young and elderly, local residents and emigrants, musicians, farmers, homemakers, artists, professionals—each contributing fragments of experience that gradually become shared cultural expression. Even men have joined these productions, assisting with lighting, sound, logistics, and encouragement, transforming what begins as a women’s project into an exercise in community solidarity itself. The result is not theatre imposed upon a community, but theatre emerging organically from within it.
This approach reflects one of the oldest strengths of Azorean society. Throughout the islands’ history, communities have survived not because every individual stood alone, but because collective effort made survival possible. Whether harvesting fields, rebuilding after earthquakes, preparing Holy Spirit feasts, or assisting neighbors during difficult times, the islands have long practiced a culture of shared responsibility. A Costela de Lilith draws upon precisely that tradition, reminding audiences that artistic creation can itself become another form of communal work. Every testimony collected, every rehearsal held, every memory preserved becomes an act of cultural stewardship.
Perhaps one of the project’s most remarkable qualities is its commitment to decentralization. Rather than concentrating its work in the larger islands where artistic infrastructure already exists, Liliana Janeiro intentionally turns her attention toward smaller communities whose stories are less frequently heard. This choice carries profound significance. Cultural vitality should never belong exclusively to metropolitan centers. Some of the richest human experiences often reside precisely where audiences are smaller, distances greater, and traditions more intimately preserved. By choosing São Jorge, and by expressing interest in continuing across the smaller islands, the project quietly challenges long-standing assumptions about where culture is produced and whose stories deserve national attention.
The expansion of the original short film into a full-length documentary therefore represents much more than a cinematic project. It is an act of historical preservation. The campaign to raise funding—through public support, grants, partnerships, and community contributions—illustrates another enduring truth about cultural work: memory itself requires investment. Archives do not preserve themselves. Oral histories disappear when those who carry them are no longer present. Every generation inherits not only the responsibility to remember but also the responsibility to record. The determination shown by Liliana Janeiro and her collaborators to continue despite financial uncertainty reflects the resilience that has always characterized Azorean cultural life.
Yet the deeper significance of this initiative extends well beyond São Jorge or even the Azores themselves. Around the world, communities are increasingly recognizing that official history often tells only part of the story. Museums, universities, and cultural institutions are revisiting forgotten voices, acknowledging that the lives of ordinary people frequently reveal more about a society than the decisions of its political leaders alone. Women, in particular, have long preserved languages, customs, family memory, religious devotion, and local identity without always receiving corresponding recognition. Projects like A Costela de Lilith contribute to this wider international conversation while remaining profoundly rooted in Azorean reality.
There is something especially moving about the decision to explore the Holy Spirit celebrations through this lens. The Festas do Espírito Santo have always been among the greatest expressions of equality, generosity, hospitality, and shared abundance within Azorean culture. Their symbolism centers upon the breaking down of hierarchies, the sharing of food, and the affirmation of community. To examine the women who quietly sustained these celebrations is therefore not to challenge tradition, but to deepen our understanding of it. Their work has always embodied the very values those festivities proclaim.
Art, at its finest, does not merely entertain; it enlarges our capacity to see one another. Community theatre, documentary film, poetry, and oral history become instruments through which forgotten dignity is restored. They remind us that heritage is not preserved only in churches, museums, or historical monuments, but also in conversations remembered, sacrifices acknowledged, and names spoken aloud once more. Every generation has the opportunity to decide whose stories will accompany the future. Projects like A Costela de Lilith ensure that the women who quietly carried so much of Azorean life will no longer remain in the margins of that future.
Perhaps this is the true miracle of cultural memory. It is not simply that the past survives. It is that every so often someone has the courage to ask a different question, to listen more carefully, and to discover that history has been speaking all along through voices we had simply forgotten to hear. In giving those voices a stage, a camera, and a place within the living narrative of the islands, A Costela de Lilith is doing far more than making theatre or film. It is helping the Azores remember themselves
Diniz Borges for Filamentos
Based on an excellent interview done by the amazing Azorean Project Complexo N. You can follow all the original interviews in Portuguese on their Facebook Page.
https://www.facebook.com/complexon.instintocriativo
You can see the project here…
