A Journey to Goa
This past December, we travelled to Goa for the Serendipity Arts Festival, a bold, interdisciplinary celebration of arts and culture that brings together artists, curators, and audiences from across South Asia and beyond. At Third Version Creative, we’re always looking to challenge our perspectives, and Serendipity offered us a privileged essential opportunity to experience work rooted in different traditions, histories, and ways of making. We saw work generated by a variety of international artists from visual art to traditional Kathakali, from AI generated landscapes to Puppet guided walks through the magnificent Art Park.
“For us, being at Serendipity wasn’t just about seeing new work—it was about encountering different creative roots. ”
Why Serendipity Matters
Serendipity Arts Festival is one of the largest multi-disciplinary arts festivals in South Asia, spanning performance, visual arts, film, culinary arts, music, and craft. What makes it truly exciting is its commitment to cross-pollination—placing contemporary practices alongside traditional forms, and international voices next to deeply local narratives. It’s a space where artistic exchange feels urgent and necessary, where work is often deeply tied to place, politics, and lived experience.
For us, being at Serendipity wasn’t just about seeing new work—it was about encountering different creative roots. The festival challenges Eurocentric models of art-making and instead foregrounds South Asian approaches to collaboration, storytelling, and process. This was critical for us: in the UK, outdoor and devised performance often operates within familiar frameworks, but seeing how artists in other contexts work with space, community, and tradition opened up new ways of thinking about our own practice.
Different Approaches, Different Perspectives
A highlight was witnessing how artists used public and non conventional artistic space—Goa’s streets, rivers, markets and even a disused hospital were all transformed into sites for art and performance. There was a deep understanding of rhythm, ritual, and environment in much of the work, whether it was contemporary dance unfolding in a temple courtyard or a theatre piece that wove together folklore, documentary, and live music. These were works shaped by their landscapes and histories, not just by funding structures or institutional expectations.
This raised vital questions: How do we make work that truly belongs to a place? How do we create in a way that is porous, open to influence, yet still rooted in our own histories? What can we learn from approaches that are collective, improvisational, and deeply embedded in communities? These questions don’t have easy answers, but being at Serendipity allowed us to ask them in a new way.
Goa - Beyond the Festival
Of course, experiencing Goa itself was just as important as experiencing the festival. This is a place shaped by layered histories—Portuguese colonial influences sit alongside ancient Hindu and Konkani traditions, Catholic churches rise next to spice farms, and the energy of markets, beaches, and city streets is unmistakably its own.
The warmth of the people, the sensory overload of colours and sounds, and, of course, the food—fresh seafood, coconut-based curries, the heat of local spices—added another dimension to our trip. It reminded us that artistic practice doesn’t exist in isolation; it’s always connected to culture, community, and geography.
Bringing It Back Home
Our time at Serendipity Arts Festival left us energised, questioning, and eager to explore what these encounters mean for our own work. It reinforced the importance of creating platforms for artists from diverse backgrounds to develop, share, and exchange their practices.
At Third Version Creative, we have been committed to supporting South Asian artists - those based in the continent and those who have roots from there. This has included our Outdoor Arts Lab - Stepping Out - delivered at 101 Outdoor Arts and supported by Without Walls - which provided space for artists to experiment, test ideas, and explore outdoor performance through different cultural lenses. We’re thrilled that, as a result of this initiative, two artists have been commissioned to create new work for outdoor settings, and you’ll be able to see their pieces later this year—more to share soon! Seeing the depth and breadth of artistic practices at Serendipity has reaffirmed our belief in these kinds of initiatives, and we’re actively looking at how we can develop them again.
How do we create space for South Asian artists in outdoor and devised performance in the UK? How can we continue to champion different approaches to making? And how do we ensure that our sector remains open, dynamic, and responsive to a truly global artistic conversation?
These are the questions we’re bringing back with us. We look forward to continuing these conversations—with artists, with audiences, and with the wider creative community. If you have thoughts, ideas, or experiences to share, we’d love to hear them. Let’s keep the dialogue going.
If you were at Serendipity too, or if anything here resonates with you, we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Lia Prentaki
Third Version Creative
