Rebecca Salvadori is an Italian-Australian video artist based in London. She is deeply connected to the world of music: her “Rave Trilogy” consists of videos shot in music-related environments ranging from Sheffield to Morocco. She has also collaborated with leading protagonists from the UK’s experimental scene, including Mark Fell, Lucy Railton and Curl Collective. Her cinematic signature favours the non-hierarchical, somewhat ephemeral, a sense of phantom dissolution of the present. She captures the subjects of her lenses in a way that is intimate yet distant. Her work has been exhibited at the South London Gallery, Freud Museum, Barbican Art Centre, PAF Festival of Film and Animation Olomouc and many others. We caught up with Rebecca while she was self-isolating during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy in May this year. 

Where and how are you at the moment? 

I’m well and am in Tuscany with my family, but I have been self-isolating in a small town on the border between Italy and Slovenia for the past three months. I’m half Italian, and the situation in Italy was getting really bad. I found myself confused about how to cope with the different responses Italy and UK were having. At some point, when they started talking about closing the borders between countries, a very good friend of mine suggested I should leave with him the next day. It was all so fast. I just packed my hard disks, and very few clothes. We basically flew to Slovenia and took a cab to the border and walked through. That night, they closed the border. 

What are you working on right now? 

My brain is very rhizomatic – I have a lot of different things going on simultaneously, and then, depending on what feels right, I pick one for the day. I’m working on a poetic documentary about an experimental music festival in Sheffield, which is the second one that I’ve done for this festival. The film is called “Different Beginnings” and portrays several musicians’ performances as well as reflections, taken from different angles, moving between personal and transpersonal scales. Mark Fell and Pedro Rocha curated a section of the festival. I’ve just finished a video for the Japanese band Bo Ningen and am working on another one for Scott Young, a Hong Kong producer I really like. 

How do you choose which projects to work on? 

The commissions are one aspect of my practice. I’ve been filming music environments for many years, making layered portraits of people and situations, constructions of things. I’m very interested in the one-to-one relationships I can create within each project. I like the challenge of finding myself in situations where I have to adjust and understand how to act. Collaboration-wise, I usually develop very strong friendships over the years. 

How do you transform a friendship into a work of art? 

There’s a lot of different elements that come into play. George Finlay Ramsay, who I’ve been close with for almost ten years, used to be my flatmate. I started filming him and working on projects together, until all the moments we shared grew into some sort of collection of materials. I have video archives of most of my friends. There’s always a very organic development between each other’s creativity. At some point, there’s a stop moment when the right shape and form comes together for the right situation. It’s a bit like relationships – depending on who you are with, you can be a different person. Different people bring out different sides of you. 

You’ve made a video called “Empathy”, which I guess was also with people you’ve known personally. In works like these, do you allow the people you film to have control over footage you take of them?
 

I’m very passionate about “filming life”, and life is quite broad. There are a lot of layers, people and relationships. It took me some time to understand where I stand by looking at the other – and what it is that I’m searching for, what it is that I’m looking for in the other, and why I keep looking at the other to understand myself. In “Empathy”, I finally saw myself in the other. Concerning the footage, I try to be in a constant open dialogue with whoever I’m filming. 

What is it that you’re looking for? 

I’m still searching.

You’ve said you’re not trying to be political per se. Lot of art these days is the opposite: political and activist. Could you talk about the aesthetic aspect of your work? 

I’ve always felt submersed by an incredible mystery, and I’ve always felt the necessity to express myself and understand my obsessions. The moment you make a good work, you’re also contributing to society. Everyone has their own struggles, obsessions and quests, and it’s very important to understand your own. I often feel subjected to different currents of thought that pull me in different directions, demanding that I assume specific positions and act upon these in order to participate, and be recognisable and understood. My response is to try to create silence, follow what feels right for me and avoid polarising attitudes in order to create space. I like poetry. I believe that having a poetic attitude towards life doesn’t mean being naive or neglecting society’s needs; rather it means embracing a tradition that recognises the experience of art as an awakening to our essential oneness with the mysteries of life. I think this is why I’m so fascinated with the tradition of portraiture; the specific glance that a girl has at the exact moment she becomes aware that I’m filming her, the way her arm bends and her whole body carries itself while listening to different sounds; the codes of language and culture acting upon the body that are recognisable symbols for many. While I’m writing these words, my dear friend Sofia Mattioli, with whom I have worked on many projects, sends me the following quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti from 1955: “Being free of society implies not being ambitious, not being covetous, not being competitive; it implies being nothing in relation to that society which is striving to be something.” I’m still reflecting on this. 

Do you refuse commissions you don’t agree with? 

It’s very complicated, but I enjoy complications. When I receive a commission, I’m always curious to understand what attracted it to me and how I can transform a situation into something that I find interesting, which is often a demanding process. Sometimes I have long conversations with the people who commission me, sometimes no conversation at all. I remember once I was asked if I was up to making a sort of short documentary about the production of a specific electric boiler, and I actually thought about it for some time! I also enjoy connecting with people who don’t really care about experimental music or films as well as those who are extremely knowledgeable and can recognise and interpret the subtle references. I try to mix different threads together, visual guidelines, storylines, so that a particular audience can connect to a particular angle 

I was watching your “Rave Trilogy” and then I re-watched Mark Leckey’s “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” because this ghostly atmosphere reminded me of that. 

I’ve been filming art and music environments ever since I got a camera. I studied visual arts in Venice, and then I moved to Berlin in 2007, where I lived for three years. During that time, I was very much involved in the club scene, filming and editing short videos of events as well as documenting the construction of art shows, filming artists in their studios, theatre companies developing performances, and many other creative and non-creative situations. I was so fascinated by life that I’d always have my camera with me, filming everything I could see and whoever I’d meet. Thinking about it in retrospect, it was a way of being simultaneously present and absent in every situation; feeling like I had a role and trying to understand my position as an artist. I was never interested in adding any interpretation to what I saw, nor constructing a story or narrative; somehow everything I filmed felt perfect the way it was, especially without my point of view. At some point, I realised I was being traversed, absorbed and consumed by everything I filmed and that I had no clear boundaries; I started to disappear behind these films and to feel overwhelmed and restless. I had to slow down, so I went back to studying. I did a master’s degree in screen studies at Goldsmith’s, focusing on the detachment of the self due to screen technology, and I basically stopped filming. London felt very different to Berlin; much more compressed and focused. I realised I needed to invert the act of filming: instead of absorbing everything from the outside towards the inside, I needed to make work starting from my own silence, from within myself and then bring it outwards. In 2012, I rented a studio and started teaching and making animations with this cryptographic language – writing poems and translating them into shapes. People became interested and started to commission me. I got into abstract language. Over the years, I think I’ve found a balance from in-to-out and from out-to-in. In the meantime, I continued going to festivals and curating music events, and over time was approached to make documentaries that I could now make in a more conscious way. 

The “Rave Trilogy” is actually composed of three videos that were made at different times and for different reasons. “Final Sheffield”, “Inside Fold” and “Desert Rave” share elements that have to do with rave culture and the communities that congregate around it; in some ways, I think they represent different stages and facets of these conscious documentaries that I’ve been developing. At 7 minutes and 12 seconds of “Final Sheffield”, Liam O’Shea, No Bounds Festival creative director, says “I’d like to do something that has never been done before”. That moment is my way of acknowledging Leckey’s work. 

Can you talk about your involvement in the music scene? You have worked with musicians who have a very specific approach to sound like Mark Fell and Lucy Railton.
 
It also comes from my family: my sister, Olivia Salvadori, is an opera singer with whom I have an art collective called Tutto Questo Sentire. Since 2014, the two of us, together with composer Sandro Mussida, have curated music residencies and experimental events investigating the theme of displacement, composition, site-specific image and sound perception. It’s one of the most emotionally complex and enriching projects I’ve ever been involved in. In 2019, we curated a series of five events in London entitled “Exercises on Displacement”. Every year, we formulate a different curatorial approach. I think it’s interesting to reflect on what it means to give and take space for ourselves and others. Mark Fell invited Lucy Railton and myself to take part in a festival in the Czech Republic a few years ago as he was curating a section of collaborative projects there. Lucy did a cello piece and I did an animation. Later on, Lucy commissioned me to make the album cover for “Paradise 94”. These relationships grow and take different shapes over the years. 

As an artist who expresses herself in a particular way through video, how do you feel about the plethora of user-generated content on social media?
 
I found myself listening to a conversation about the dissolving of the individual and how the individual is to be seen as synonymous with egocentric, while the democratic, horizontal “army of we” that the internet represents is the way to go. I believe instead that it is vital to be self-aware and to avoid automatic attitudes/responses; slow down mechanical processes and bring the individual into the centre. 

Does the evolution of technology influence how you work with it? 

I’ve been stuck with the same software for years. I really love it when I fail at trying to put things together. It should be about expressing oneself through the software rather than the other way round. That automatic aspect takes away from the individual and creates this issue of everything being uniform and video material being seen only from a perspective of style. Stylistic trends – everyone lofi, or super HD at the same time, but there’s no dialogue about the message within image quality, because image quality already has an embedded message. The moment you’re using a certain image quality – you’re shooting with an iPhone, with DSLR, etc. – you have to be aware that you’re already embracing a message. 

In some of your videos – like “Empathy” and the “Rave Trilogy” – there are people talking, but there’s no audible human voice. 

You come back home from a club night, wake up in the morning or in the afternoon, and you have memories of certain things, certain sentences, but you don’t necessarily remember who said what. I don’t think it’s important. The content is what is important. Editing is a very powerful tool, and I’m aware of that. I feel that I have a responsibility to respect those I film. Silence helps to capture the inner world, their thoughts and phrases that, cut out of the context, give the opportunity to think up and feel up what is happening, as my friend and curator Dasha Birukova said after watching it, an intangible space, a space of emotions, estrangement, feeling of being.

COVER PHOTO Henerico Rossi