Adriana Sá

Adriana Sá was born in 1972 in Lisbon, Portugal and grew up in Leipzig, Germany. She now lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. Her work includes collaborative compositions, interdisciplinary workshops, improvisations, performance-installation-lecture projects, and site-specific multimedia performances.

This year, she presented a live sound composition with Erin Macgonigle in New York and a workshop about artistic collaboration practices at the ZDB Gallery in Lisbon. She participated in the Experimental Intermedia Foundation's Festival With No Fancy Name in New York in 1999. She has performed internationally: in Portugal, the Netherlands, Austria, and the United States, among others.

“NOTE 1:
After the last one or two centuries of increasing overload in urban life, one might recognize certain human physical / mental / emotional adaptations towards dealing with overlapping sound stimuli. We can perceive the poem of subtlety within noise. The natural harmony got out of random sound mix. The human behind the machine, the punctuation of the less expected.
An acoustic surround system provides ideal conditions for listening to audiomemories; it allows a wider range of perceptions in the soundscape. Sound immersion means a trip through sound's spatiality.

NOTE 2:
Assuming the artistic making as a performative procedure itself implies playing with the extent to which this more or less private process gets explicit; either if performing publicly or if working under more private circumstances. Anyway it can be a personal exposure within a game between control over what happens and acceptance-integration of the "external" - a deal with randomness.
Improvising in collaboration seems to emphasize the demand for openness and tuning, immediate-instinctive reaction regarding the circumstances. It happens within a single output dialogue. Beyond a neural awareness of the whole, this work process requires that fragile balance between one's individuality and one's production in conjunction; a balance worked out as unity without losing the creative tension, i.e., the specific differences.
The network is growing constantly, it spreads throughout the world, electronic mailboxes feed it and one is occasionally provided with intensive living together fragments. It could reach a collapse through the excess of fragmentation, but it hasn’t so far. Recordings of collaborations are tools of undeniable reality. If one tries to avoid honesty, one is betrayed by the work.

NOTE 3:
Receptivity, emotions, physic, impulses and intuitions (the body) are raw material. The performative affirmation of the self is also its representation. Every act and movement is stretched through this significance - it acquires the force of a ritual.
The work process balances non-linearity and randomness with intuitive control, it creates and simultaneously follows the moment. Stimuli and emotions populate the work's environmental density. The body generates them while it simultaneously remains unprotected when they return in their "visibility": this feedback takes one to unexplainable liminalities. It is a permanent game between perception, challenge and reaction: a mirror game.

How real is each reality.”