CREATIVE RESEARCH

Encounters and Collisions traces these episodes from my life since leaving Portugal. The project originated as a composition commissioned by Chamber Music America and evolved into a book featuring my own drawings. The audio version features my narration of each story. Designed to be experienced with or without the accompanying music, the book stands as both a visual and sonic reflection on adaptation, loss and transformation.

“Essential as air, solid as earth, and cleansing as water, Serpa’s resonant musical world teems with beauty, grief, love, and humanity. Intimate Strangers is a towering achievement by an artist whose gifts seem to know no bounds.” Monarch Magazine

“Ms. Serpa’s thoughtfully arranged music explores sonic dualities: spoken and sung; acoustic and electronic; scored and improvised; sound and silence. Like Mr. Iduma’s texts, her music mesmerizes, simultaneously comforting and confronting its audience” Larry Blumenfeld, Wall Street Journal

” It resonates on a level that goes beyond admiration of the aesthetic of the art of itself, but rather one must marvel at how it penetrates the soul of the human being and calls upon us to reflect upon the world in which we live.” Jonathan Blackman, Occhi Magazine

“The ultimate vision belongs to Serpa, who’s among the most singular talents working in music today.” Michael Roberts, Jazziz Magazine

Intimate Strangers, which premiered in 2018 as a John Zorn Commission at National Sawdust, is an interdisciplinary musical performance that portrays writer Emmanuel Iduma’s travels in several African countries.

Taking Nigeria as a point of departure, it describes several encounters the writer has along his journey from Lagos to Sarajevo along the coast. The journey takes unexpected turns, resulting in reflections on the sea, the desert as well as natural and artificial borders he is faced with. There is beauty in these encounters, even when they describe love and loss, grief and longing, displacement and war, privilege or apathy.

While Emmanuel represents himself, Sara Serpa along with the voices of Sofía Rei and Aubrey Johnson are simultaneously narrators, storytellers and spirits that travel along, opening several emotional doors through the piece. With music composed by Serpa, it features also Qasim Naqvi on modular synth and pianist Matt Mitchell.

Like echoes from a distant reality, Intimate Strangers aims to reflect on how we see the other and how we describe hospitality and humanity for future generations

“An overtly political work about the Portuguese colonization of Angola, the program paired Serpa’s compositions with video from old Super-8 home movies of her grandfather made in Angola (…)”  Donwbeat Magazine

“(…) a singular multimedia experience both spellbinding and haunting in nature. Recognition was truly beyond category.” All About Jazz

“The displaying of the footage, intercalated with texts by the revolutionary Amilcar Cabral, earned an extra-sensorial meaning with the emplacement of chants that ranged from sparkling to sufferable to propulsive, often creating moments of pure lyricism by themselves or falling in concurrent ostinatos with the other instruments.” Jazz Trail

The material has been edited and transformed to create a sensory experience in which music and image are juxtaposed with texts by the revolutionary, Amílcar Cabral (from Unity and Struggle), Luandino Vieira and Linda Heywood. The documentary explores the co-existence of two realities: one, verbally described by the colonized, and the other, filmed by the colonizer, proposing and imagining a new narrative, while inviting the viewer/listener to reflect on history in a visceral way. 

Recognition first took shape as an experimental performance, where live musicians crafted a soundtrack for a silent film. Comprising 12 scenes, the film blends written composition, free improvisation, and spoken word. Over time, the project evolved into both an audio album and a film. Recognition premiered at The Drawing Room in 2017 and has since been presented at Alwan Arts Center, The Kitchen, Park Avenue Armory, Fábrica do Pão (Lisboa), and Georgetown Day School.