Eu Sou Ofélia is a performance that merges personal and political histories, combining a contemporary reckoning with gender-based violence with the haunting tragedy of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. The piece begins with the recitation of real-life headlines detailing acts of violence against women—names of victims, their brutal stories, and the way their lives were taken. Each name and each account stands as a stark reminder of the ongoing cycle of abuse, erasure, and harm.

As the names are spoken, the performer fills a large waterbag with water from smaller bags, attaching it to her head in a symbolic act of self-imposed suffocation. The weight of the water becomes a physical manifestation of the emotional and social burden women carry under patriarchal violence. The struggle for breath mirrors the stifling control that violence exerts, attempting to silence and subdue.

With the bag finally broken, the performer begins the monologue of Ophelia from Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller—Ophelia as a survivor, not a victim. Her fragmented speech shifts from suffering to assertion, embodying the reclamation of voice and agency, even in the aftermath of overwhelming violence. The act of survival, of speaking through the anguish, becomes a powerful declaration against the silence imposed by abuse, giving life and voice to those who, in real life, have been denied both.