Deicy Sanches

Moça, Mulher e Velha

Screen writing, Providenza 2026

Genesis

Originally from the Cape Verde Islands, an independent nation since 1975 after five centuries of slavery and Portuguese colonial rule, I explore the identity of the people of Santiago Island. At the end of the 1990s, while still very young, I began travelling regularly to the archipelago with my family, returning throughout my adolescence and into my twenties. My parents come from the Tarrafal region, in the rural inland north of Santiago. During these journeys, I encountered a way of life deeply rooted in agriculture and pastoralism, while experiencing the culture my parents had passed on to me in its original environment. It is a culture shaped by enduring African traditions, expressed through music, dance, batuku, and mourning rituals for the dead. Among these legacies, the figure of the fugitive slave has become central to my research.

The enslaved person who escapes the plantation in search of a space of freedom - a place of their own where they can forge a new relationship to the world, beyond the master's temporality and the structures of slavery - occupies a central place in my thinking. My research investigates memory, seeking to understand what ancient sacred orders have inscribed deep within the flesh of people who were deported and uprooted.

At the intersection of photography, film, and choreography, my creative practice explores alternative ways of inhabiting the world that are not founded on the intensive exploitation of land or the subjugation of those deemed inferior. Drawing on my heritage and artistic sensibility, I engage with questions of identity, embodied memory, and movement as a form of cosmic vibrational experience. Through a documentary approach combined with poetic experimentation, my work brings into dialogue marginalized bodies and aesthetic practices.

Film

The project I am developing at Providenza is a writing residency for my new documentary film, Moça, Mulher e Velha, which intertwines documentary, fiction, and dance, and continues my ongoing exploration of Cape Verdean identity.

Today, in dominant narratives surrounding the formation of Cape Verdean national identity, creolization is presented as the defining story of the archipelago’s society. Yet within this process of racial and cultural mixing, the enslaved Black woman is reduced to a mere vehicle for reproducing the white paternal lineage, excluded from most historical accounts and erased from local genealogical memory.

Through this film, I seek to examine, within the history of the country, the ancestors we choose to commemorate and those we choose to forget. In doing so, I hope to better understand the colonial legacies and the persistence of racist and sexist colonial structures in shaping the collective identity of the archipelago. Beginning with my own family history and genealogy, I aim to uncover broader questions about the history of Cape Verdean lineages. Why does Cape Verde, more than fifty years after gaining independence in 1975, remain attached to narratives of mixed ancestry that continue to silence the women who were the principal agents of the country's culture and creolization?

Process

Research and writing form a central part of my creative process, and island territories have long been places of particular interest to me. Moving from one island to another, I seek to uncover the resonances that emerge through cultural practices, especially rituals surrounding death and mourning. As Providenza itself is located within an insular landscape, my time in residence allowed me to discover part of Corsica’s territory and history, with a particular interest in mazzerism and its associated rituals.

My first days in residence were devoted to becoming familiar with the site and its different spaces, learning about its history and its connection to Antoine, and meeting the team, the artists, and the volunteers. I was fortunate to stay in one of the most recently built cabins, which included a sleeping area, a workspace, and a terrace.

Prior to the residency, I had already begun researching my subject using materials gathered during my most recent trips to Cape Verde, as well as archival resources from the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. While in Corsica, I focused on writing the first draft of the film's screenplay.

Following on from my previous essay film on the myth of racial mixing in Cape Verde, my cinematic writing explores forms and aesthetics, formats and textures, in an attempt to translate onto the screen the complexity of the layers of magma that compose our identities: deported bodies, uprooted bodies, enslaved bodies, ladinizado bodies, creative bodies, diasporic bodies.

As a dancer, I also bring movement into the image, seeing it as a way of expressing the fullness of being - body and soul. Here, dance becomes an attempt to reveal the traces and embodied archives of our existence, awakening images and states that revive lived experience. Through gesture, I seek to recompose the world and imagine other possibilities. I conceive of a film that moves between the material and the immaterial, between present female bodies and absent female bodies that continue to exist through imagination and the archive.

During the residency, I had the pleasure of meeting the Moroccan artist Nabil Aniss, who was also in residence. Through our conversations and the discovery of each other's practices, we found shared sensibilities around dance, our relationship to death and the invisible world, and an interest in marginalized bodies. During one of our discussions by the natural pool - his favourite place on the site - he introduced me to the dance film A Mossa, directed by Jacques Malaterre and choreographed by the Corsican dancer Jacques Patarozzi. Accompanied by polyphonic singing and choreographed refrains, the film stages rituals of traditional rural Corsican life: the communal feast, men's games, the vendetta, and the wake of the dead.

Corsica remains, to me, a deeply enigmatic island. In speaking with the co-curator, Léa, I came to understand the Corsican people's distinctive relationship to the sea. For them, the sea evokes the many invasions and occupations their land has endured throughout history. Repeatedly forced inland, taking refuge in the mountains, they developed a culture more closely tied to the land than to fishing. In Cape Verde, by contrast - a territory historically shaped by colonial settlement, drought, and famine - the Atlantic Ocean embodies a constant tension between hope and departure: the desire to leave but having to stay, or the desire to stay but having to leave.

During a shared dinner at Casa, I met André Silva, one of the residency's volunteers, a musician originally from Portugal. We spoke at length about Lisbon's Afro-diasporic music scene, and more specifically about ghetto sound, a musical movement initiated by Afro-descendant communities from African countries formerly colonized by Portugal. On the day of his departure, André handed me a book that he strongly encouraged me to read: Mazzeri, Finzioni, Signadori, Dorothy Carrington's essay on the magico-religious rites of Corsican culture. Through its pages, I gained a deeper understanding of Corsican history and its relationship to death. I was struck by the parallels with beliefs found in Cape Verde and across the African continent: the possibility for human beings to take on animal forms, belief in the invisible world - what Corsicans call the "Other World" - and the tradition that people believed to possess "magical" gifts were thought to have been improperly baptized and therefore only imperfectly purified.

Moving between the different spaces of the residency - my studio, the terrace of the Fabrica, and the natural pool - I continued developing the screenplay through mood boards and technical storyboards. In my creative process, the voice-over text serves as the guiding thread through which I imagine the film's sequences. I envision several female inner voices, expressed poetically in the first person.

The residency is nestled in the high mountains of the Nebbio region, and on several occasions we had the opportunity to explore the surrounding landscape and neighbouring villages. We visited the town of Nonza, at the northern tip of the island, with its vast black-sand beach. We were also fortunate that Providenza is located close to magnificent waterfalls, whose presence became part of the rhythm of the residency itself.

Presentation

For the residency presentation, Nabil suggested that we create something together. We conceived a film-performance that brings together our images, audiovisual archives, voice, and music, all drawn from our respective research processes.

I contributed Super 8 footage shot in Cape Verde at my grandparents' home, along with digital footage of the island's volcanic landscapes. I also recorded excerpts from the voice-over text I had written during the residency. Nabil brought archival images of rituals in Morocco, Corsican archival material related to mazzerism, and a live performed text.

The resulting film is, to borrow Nabil's words, a somewhat cryptic exploration - one that poetically and spiritually reflects the creative process unfolding between us. It embodies our encounter, our shared sensibilities, and our mutual interest in marginalized bodies and aesthetic practices.

Credits

Photographs : Fogo Island, Cape Verde - Deicy Sanches

Personal photographs by Deicy Sanches during her residency at Providenza, 2026

“A Mossa” by Jacques Malaterre (Image de la Culture / CNC)

Midju Branco, Cape Verde - Deicy Sanches