All Islands Are Mountains
Nuno Serrão
A tale of an evolving landscape
We are living in the age of multi-tabs, binge-watching, and immediatism. Travelling and arriving faster than ever, we no longer have the time to understand what we are slowly losing. If all trips are made on comfortable shortcuts, what will happen to the question posed out of discomfort? I’m trying to find the answer in the contrasts of the evolving Madeira landscape, where both natural and constructed spaces are gradually being transformed by a new Europe trying to keep up with modern life.
“Nuno Serrão is a Portuguese photographer, interested in the dialogues between science and contemporary art. Each of his images considers how information is handled, shared, and perceived, framing scenarios as micro-narratives, demonstrating a sensitivity and a curiosity for the planet and its inhabitants. (…)”
Kate Simpson, Aesthetica Magazine, 2019
“(…) His cinematic compositions and unorthodox approach to portraiture demonstrate a sensitivity to the world around him. (…)”
gelstaten, 2021
“(…) Each photograph he creates holds an intense air of mystery, a fog that is wrapped in the never-ending eerie. (…)”
Christina Nafziger, Create! Magazine, 2021
“(…) They depict deserted landscapes being at times overtaken by imposing brutalist architecture, translating a form of melancholy through its aesthetic simplicity. The cinematic compositions, deprived of human life, show places of passage and transition where time seems to stand still for a relieving moment of quietness before a choreography of movements resumes. (…)”
Claire Ducresson-Boët, Fotogalerie Friedrichshain, 2022
Hi, I’m a Portuguese photographer and filmmaker born on Madeira Island. My blank slate starts with a functional level of emotion, logic, minimalism, and curiosity; I consider them the building blocks of my creative process.
Led by curiosity, I often document ambiguous but frameable narratives that, in the end, pose a new set of questions, like the one from my current research topic: We are living in the age of multi-tabs, binge-watching, and immediatism. Travelling and arriving faster than ever, we no longer have the time to understand what we are slowly losing. If all trips are made on comfortable shortcuts, what will happen to the question posed out of discomfort?
With the sum of all relatable questions, I think I’ll get an answer.
My House is a Parking Lot
A tale of greed
For 25 years, I looked at the stars from a cement terrace on this very spot. Today, the cold cement on my back at dawn has turned into a tarred concrete parking lot at my feet, and what used to be my grandparents’ house, where the nights were dark and the sky was closer, turned into a viaduct supporting a kind of highway with secondary road traffic, which skips the valleys and pierces the mountains of the high mountains of the Madeiran capital as if avoiding submitting to the curves of reason and values other than those of concrete and corporate greed.