(Alexey Dodsworth | Sacatar Fellow 2021 | Literature – Portuguese | Brazil)
Screenplay created by Alexey Dodsworth during his group residency at Sacatar in 2021, “As Confissões da Bahia em Quadrinhos” won two of the most prestigious comic book awards in Brazil in 2024: the Odyssey Award for Fantastic Literature and the Best Editorial Project Award at the HQMIX Trophy!
Celebrating the achievement, Dodsworth said:
“We won!!! As Confissões da Bahia em Quadrinhos received the Odyssey Award for Fantastic Literature in the ‘Fantastic Comics’ category. We are the first team to adapt the story of the Inquisition in Bahia into comics. Special thanks to Instituto Sacatar, which believed in our project in 2021 and helped make it possible.”
The AS CONFISSÕES DA BAHIA (BAHIA CONFESSIONS) project was one of those selected in the international Sacatar Open Call for Group Projects 2021.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
“As Confissões da Bahia” is a graphic novel that transposes the intervention of the Portuguese Inquisition in Bahia between 1591 and 1593 to comics. During those two years, priest Heitor Furtado de Mendonça was sent by the Tribunal do Santo Ofício (Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition) in Lisbon to hear the denunciations and confessions of the Bahian population. Dozens of people were questioned, judged and punished for various reasons, the most frequent being homosexual practices, Judaism and rites of African origin. The documentation of these processes is in the public domain and available on the Torre do Tombo website in Lisbon, having already been published in Brazil in the form of a historical collection. This project intends to create an unprecedented work in Brazil: to offer a comic book version of the most impactful confessions and real inquisitorial processes suffered by 16th-century Bahians in an accessible language. We intend, therefore, to popularize through comics a passage in the history of Bahia that, despite being important, remains very little known.
GROUP MEMBERS / ASSIGNMENTS
Alexey Dodsworth – Screenplay
Cristina Lasaitis – Critical analysis / Editorial review
Hugo Canuto – Illustration
Kirnna Schaun – Illustration
