Women who got up at five in the morning to sell fish, barefoot, taking their children with them. Women who saved their husbands from downfall, once, twice, three times. Women who went to war and brought back poems that made their eyes burn. Women who learned to read through theatre. Women who hid their love because they knew it wasn’t time to love freely. Women who have changed time with their lives. Single, married, divorced and widowed women with sons, women with daughters, women with grandchildren, women with granddaughters, happy women. Happy women. Happy perhaps because they recognise the freedom that is dawning in their lives. There is always so little time and space to love someone. During those 15 days, we were who we wanted to be: a group of people looking into ourselves through the eyes of others in whose skin we were also living. The others who were us.

We interrupt our lives, which will be separated again in less than a few days, for a piece of shared memory. For now, let’s celebrate this meeting. Then we’ll pick through the rubble with varying degrees of nostalgia and learning. Maybe it’s the gerund – the time we brought back from the Alentejo – that will allow us to change the mundane world by changing it.

The project was developed as part of ATOS, an initiative of the D. Maria II National Theatre and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.