GASSONA (1607)

FEDORA
Opera Prize 2027
Shortlist

GASSONA (1607)

Spain
Asociación Cultural Cronos

GASSONA (1607) © © Luis Tabuenca. Cleared for international use by Asociación Cultural Cronos. i

GASSONA (1607) is a chamber opera that transforms a documented case of institutional abuse into a spatial work on truth, testimony and memory for voices, ensemble, electronics and movement.

Presentation

GASSONA (1607) is a contemporary chamber opera based on the documented case of Paula Gassona, a woman who worked at Barcelona’s Hospital de la Santa Creu and who, in 1607, was deprived of her liberty, publicly punished and expelled after being implicated in an episode whose surviving documentation reveals coercion, contradictions and retractions.

Paula later sought legal advice, gathered testimony and initiated proceedings to challenge the institutional version of events. Although she did not obtain the redress she sought, those proceedings generated the archive through which her story can be reconstructed today.

Rather than offering a historical reconstruction, GASSONA transforms the archive itself into musical and theatrical material. Conflicting testimonies, repetitions, omissions and changes of perspective become compositional and dramaturgical mechanisms.

The work explores how public truth is produced, how institutions determine whose voices are believed, how punishment acts upon the body, and how testimony can reopen a narrative that appeared to have been fixed. The dramatic trajectory moves from a woman spoken about by others towards a woman attempting to reclaim the right to narrate her own story.