Rebecca Salvadori works at the intersection of video art and documentary, where her film research explores the fragmentation of visual experience, practices of self-observation, and the tradition of portraiture. She has extensive experience in filming environments with a focus on non-hierarchical and non-chronological layering and sequencing of audio to footage. Her film works act as constellations of deeply personal and willfully elusive heterogeneous elements—multifaceted portraits of moments, people, and environments that can be approached from different angles as they shift between personal and transpersonal scales. For the past 15 years, Salvadori has consistently engaged with experimental music, driven by a strong interest in connecting moving images with sound practices through alternative storytelling forms. Since 2019, she has further experimented with the convergence of live performance, live filming, and moving image, drawing from her deep-rooted cinematic research within London’s underground music ecosystems.

She is the author of “Rave Trilogy” (2017-2020), a series of film works dedicated to electronic music, shot across Sheffield, London, and Morocco’s Agafay desert; “The Sun Has No Shadow” (2022), an intimate visual journey centered on London’s FOLD club and the UNFOLD rave format; “TRESOR TAPES” (2022), commissioned by TRESOR, reflects on different ways of approaching personal and collective archives, memory, and club documentation. Her ongoing project, “Messengers” (2022-ongoing), is a multifaceted film-in-the-making, unfolding across multiple dimensions and featuring conversations about the nature of friendship, music, and relationships with the city of London. “A forbidden Distance” (2024) commissioned by TIMES, the Independent Movement for Electronic Scenes and jointly produced with Iranian-Canadian brothers Mohammad and Mehdi (Saint Abdullah) and Irish sound-designer and musician Ian McDonnell (Eomac). “A forbidden Distance” will be presented throughout 2024 and 2025 at Unsound, Semibreve, Berlin ATONAL, and Sónar.

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
Oscillating between being both a participant and an observer, Salvadori wishes to keep the individual relations at the fulcrum of her research. “All we got is us in the moment” is a moving portrait of the collaboration and friendship of musician Coby Sey and Salvadori. The work follows a conversation between the two that has been unfolding for years, serving as both a moving portrait of friendship and as an assemblage of scenes from two lives lived through art and music.

For Salvadori, the network of musicians/ friends are the protagonists and the “messengers” of a specific system of beliefs and attitudes within the arts. These messengers are “the ‘inventors of souls,” working relentlessly and passionately to raise consciousness and incite suppressed intelligence.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
Since 2019, Salvadori has been exploring the convergence of live performance, moving image, and live filming, drawing inspiration from her extensive research within London’s experimental music scene. “Messengers” emerges as a multifaceted film-in-progress, unfolding across multiple dimensions. It is a hybrid film experience that serves as a self-portrait, a portrait of a group of artists, of different music scenes, and a depiction of a city at a specific moment in time. “Messengers” is part of a vast video archive documenting relationships and experimental music, which Salvadori has been building over the past fourteen years (2010-2024).

In 2022, Salvadori created a temporary set and open laboratory in a former Jesuit monastery in Konvikt, Czech Republic, commissioned by PAF Olomouc, Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art. Here, musicians Kenichi Iwasa and Maxwell Sterling, light artist Charlie Hope, writer and curator Elaine Tam, and photographer Henerico Rossi were captured in a series of one-to-one conversations, mise-en-scènes, and live performances, presented as an event with an audience. The themes explored include the nature of friendship, the driving forces behind their artistic processes, and their profound connections with the city of London.

Over the past two years, Salvadori has been deeply engaged in the development of “Messengers,” experimenting with its form and presentation across various contexts. The CIRCA Prize will be dedicated to the further development and finalization of this complex hybrid film experience.

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