About SOOPA
SOOPA is a living collective active since 1999 in Porto, Portugal. Founded as a platform where sound, performance, and visual research converge, it has evolved into a proteiform, multidisciplinary ecosystem spanning music, stage creation, expanded dramaturgy, and installation-based work.
Operating through a porous network of collaborators—musicians, performers, visual artists, scenographers, filmmakers, and thinkers—SOOPA develops projects that move fluidly between disciplines. Working through interconnected practices, the collective forms a spectral cosmos that moves across home-made science fiction, fabricated traditions, inner-station jungle, radio-magnetic animism, phantom agencies, and archaic resonances.
Across its history, SOOPA has generated a constellation of musical entities including HHY & The Macumbas, HHY & The Kampala Unit, F.R.I.C.S., Mécanosphère, United Scum Soundclash, HOMO, and Faca Monstro. The collective has also co-produced stage works with artists like Catarina Miranda, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, and others working between sound, choreography, and expanded dramaturgy. Its work explores transformation, ritual, perception, and the shifting boundaries between the visible, the occult, and the technological.
Porto as a Creative Catalyst
Working from Porto's compact artistic environment, SOOPA embodies the city's natural tendency toward cross-pollination. Improvisers, metal musicians, choreographers, filmmakers, electronic producers, and visual artists intersect organically, forming a scene where "experimental" describes an approach rather than a genre. This context fosters hybrid forms, collective authorship, and ongoing dialogue between practices.
Since 2001, SOOPA's activities have spanned music releases, publications, and the organization of stage works, exhibitions, concerts, cycles, and conferences featuring figures such as Carlos Zíngaro, Zbigniew Karkowski, Secret Chiefs 3, The Bug, Dälek, Faust, Damo Suzuki, Arthur Doyle, Zu, Eugene Chadbourne, Steve Mackay, Rafael Toral, Leticia Skrycky, Kenneth Anger, Eyvind Kang, Jessika Kenney, Gonçalo Guiomar, Anthony Pateras, Robin Fox, Adrian Sherwood, Mark Stewart, Scott Nydegger, Fréderic Alstadt, Só Filipe, Deeogo, Aurora Katana, Ewen Chardronnet, Raz Mesinai, Niko Esterle, Manuel Neto, Gustavo Costa, Miguel Carneiro, Vera Mantero, Oficina ARARA, and many others.
Vision and Practice
The collective combines speculative thinking with pragmatic, DIY-driven production. Drawing inspiration from traditions that build their own cosmologies, SOOPA remains committed to sustainable, autonomous modes of creation. This duality—visionary yet grounded—shapes its ongoing mission: to cultivate a singular space for experimental work that is local in scale, transdisciplinary in method, and oriented toward expanded, imaginative worlds.
OOPSA é apoiada por:
