Improvisando Memórias:
criação colaborativa e evocação afetiva na improvisação musical contemporânea
Improvising Memories: collaborative creation and emotional evocation in contemporary musical improvisation

This project was born from the desire to explore musical improvisation not only as a technique or aesthetic, but as a way of listening, sharing and reconstructing personal memories. We are conducting this research with a focus on the different ways in which individual memories can be negotiated, evoked and transformed through collaborative musical improvisation.

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Improvisation, when experienced as radical listening to others and to oneself, becomes a fertile place for the emergence of affections, silences and memories. This project is based on the premise that improvising is also remembering — not only in the sense of recovering something from the past, but of reinscribing it in the present through sound, the body and relationships.

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From this, we structured an investigation in three phases, each involving collaborations with musicians from different geographical and cultural origins (United Kingdom, Portugal and Angola), with the duo formed by Ana Fridman and José Dias as a constant core. The sessions start from personal memories shared orally, which will give rise to musical improvisations recorded and critically reflected upon.

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The research questions underlying this project are as follows:

• How can musical improvisation function as a language to express and negotiate personal memories?

• What sound and formal elements emerge when improvising based on emotional memories?

• How does improvisation allow us to reframe memories — including difficult or ambiguous ones?

• What is lost and what is transformed when trying to translate memory into music?

• How does the encounter between musicians from different cultural contexts affect the way memories are heard and recreated?

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To answer these questions, we aim to achieve the following objectives:

• Create a body of improvisational practices that start from personal memory as a creative stimulus.

• Investigate the relationship between musical form and memory structure (fragmentation, repetition, silence).

• Produce critical reflection on the role of improvisation in intercultural listening and in the construction of collective memory.

• Develop artistic and academic materials that contribute to the fields of music, performance and memory studies.

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Each practice-research session follows the same methodological principle:

• Oral sharing of an individual memory

• Collaborative improvisation based on this memory

• Audiovisual recording of the session

• Critical re-listening and subsequent reflective dialogue

• Annotation of processes and perceptions.

The sessions result in artistic materials (album, concerts) as well as academic analyses and writings.