PENSO LOGO ESCREVO is the name of the Creative Writing Workshop proposed by PROSA as a space for inner listening and the creation of fiction, starting from a focus on narratology and the representation of reality. It is an invitation to practice a form of writing that puts us in touch with the ‘self’ — that being who sometimes reveals itself within us, sometimes in the other — building language as one would build a place. Writing is a gesture of search, a quest for being. A liberated act that, beyond enhancing communication skills, stands as a tool for care, resistance, and self-reinvention. In a world increasingly demanding of creativity, writing also becomes a means of survival — emotional, symbolic, and at times, physical.

In this context, writing comes closer to the body and to time as sensitive matter. It is a muscular exercise, made of flow, hesitation, and impulse. To write is to enter a rhythm, a stroke, a pulse that inscribes us into the world with identity, with poetry, with memory. And each person will find their own way: through an intimate journal, an elaborate fiction, an unsent letter, an abrupt poem, or an idea in the making. The workshop invites this inaugural and liberating gesture: to begin. To rewrite oneself.

There is an ongoing dialogue between writing and cinema — sometimes silent, sometimes explosive. Both languages operate as assemblages of reality, creating meanings and fabulations. Both work with narrative structures, images, and characters. Cinema can be seen as a visual extension of writing — or writing as its primordial sketch. When a film approaches writing not only as content, but also as form, something fascinating happens: language becomes visible, the text gains a body, and the body becomes text.

That is precisely what The Pillow Book (1995), by Peter Greenaway, offers us. Inspired by the eponymous book by Japanese court lady Sei Shōnagon — written in the 10th century as a collection of notes, observations, and lists about daily life at the imperial court — the film merges calligraphy, skin, and desire. In this unique work, writing ceases to be mere record and becomes a visual and sensual ritual. The ephemerality of ink on skin, the act of writing as physical and intimate contact, evokes the idea that everything we write is in constant dissolution — yet no less real for it.

Greenaway constructs a film that is also a reflection on the very art of storytelling: between the ephemeral and the permanent, between calligraphy and memory, between tradition and technology. The character of Nagiko writes upon bodies as a form of personal and aesthetic affirmation, and through that act claims the right to narrate herself. It is a film that crosses languages, cultures, and mediums — just like writing itself, which travels through time but never ceases to be of the now. In watching it, and in writing, perhaps we too may find ourselves more clearly inscribed in the world.

(Curatorship of Alexandre Braga)