The Fragmentation of Visual Experience in the Work of Rebecca Salvadori: Between Video Art, Documentary and Performance

Abstract

This article examines how Rebecca Salvadori’s moving-image practice negotiates the boundaries between video art, documentary, and performance through audiovisual fragmentation. Drawing on a qualitative comparative analysis of five purposively selected works: Rave Trilogy (2017–2020), The Sun Has No Shadow (2022), Messengers (2022–ongoing), All We Got Is Us in the Moment (2023), and A Forbidden Distance (2024), the study investigates how visual composition, editing, sound, and temporal organisation contribute to documentary representation. The analysis adopts a post-digital perspective concerned with the artistic uses and coexistence of technologies, alongside theories of documentary performativity and embodied perception. The findings demonstrate that fragmentation acquires distinct functions across the corpus, including disclosing documentary construction, reorganising personal archives, articulating collaborative encounters, and connecting individual testimony with collective environments. The article proposes sensorial documentation as a situated analytical concept describing how identifiable documentary materials are recomposed through audiovisual form to articulate experiential, relational, and conceptual dimensions of recorded situations. Rather than treating sensory intensity or fragmentation as inherently documentary, the concept emphasises the relationships between recorded material, formal organisation, and the experiences or ideas made perceptible. The study contributes to discussions of performative imaging and post-digital moving-image practices without making empirical claims about audience reception.

1. Introduction

Contemporary moving-image practices increasingly cross the boundaries between video art, documentary, performance, and live audiovisual production. These intersections have a longer history within video art, whose development has involved exchanges between artistic disciplines and modes of production (Elwes 2005). More recent theoretical approaches have expanded the discussion beyond medium-specific categories, considering the material, performative, and relational dimensions of moving images. Within this context, post-digital theory offers a perspective on the technological and cultural conditions of audiovisual production that does not privilege technological novelty (Cramer 2015). Theories of documentary performativity and embodied perception further contribute to understanding how moving images engage with processes of representation, bodily experience, and spectatorship (Bruzzi 2006; Marks 2000; Sobchack 2004).

Rebecca Salvadori (b. 1984) is an Italian-Australian artist whose moving-image practice brings these questions into dialogue. Her work encompasses collaborative portraits of musicians, electronic music communities, and artistic networks, frequently incorporating forms of self-representation. Her approach is particularly relevant to a post-digital inquiry because of the relationships it establishes between technical experimentation, materiality, and collaborative production, rather than simply because it belongs to a contemporary technological context. Since her first exhibition in 2010, Salvadori has presented her work internationally at institutions and festivals, including the Barbican Centre, the ICA and Southbank Centre in London, Triennale Milano, Fundação de Serralves, SculptureCenter New York, Sónar, Berlin Atonal, Semibreve, Unsound, and CTM. She has also produced commissioned works for cultural institutions such as Tresor (Berlin) and FOLD (London) (Salvadori n.d.).

Despite this sustained international presence, Salvadori’s practice remains comparatively underexamined in academic scholarship. Its intersections with documentary, performance, and post-digital audiovisual production make it a productive case study for investigating how moving images operate across disciplinary boundaries. The article does not propose her work as representative of post-digital practice as a whole. Instead, it examines how fragmentation, sensoriality, collaboration, and performativity intersect within her particular audiovisual language.

The central research question is: how does Rebecca Salvadori’s audiovisual practice negotiate the boundaries between video art, documentary, and performance through fragmentation, and what documentary and relational functions do these operations acquire within a post-digital context? To address this question, the article analyses five works: Rave Trilogy (2017–2020), The Sun Has No Shadow (2022), All We Got Is Us in the Moment (2023), Messengers (2022–ongoing), and A Forbidden Distance (2024). The latter three also have live audiovisual configurations developed in collaboration with musicians. The analysis focuses on the recorded works, using documentation of live presentations to contextualise their broader performative practice.

The corpus covers works produced between 2017 and 2024, encompassing electronic music communities, collaborative portraiture, artistic processes, displacement, and identity. These different contexts allow the study to compare audiovisual procedures associated with fragmented temporalities, non-linear construction, self-representation, and collaborative production, while examining how their functions vary between works. The selection thus supports an investigation of fragmentation across different artistic contexts without presupposing that it operates identically in each case.

The article argues that fragmentation in Salvadori’s practice is not exclusively a formal aesthetic characteristic but a set of audiovisual operations through which recorded gestures, voices, temporalities, and relationships are reorganised. By examining how these operations acquire different documentary and relational functions across the selected works, the study contributes to discussions of performative imaging and post-digital moving-image practices. It also proposes a closer academic examination of an artist whose work has received comparatively limited scholarly attention.

2. Theoretical Framework: Post-Digital Moving Images and Hybrid Audiovisual Practices

Contemporary moving-image practices frequently combine technologies, material processes, and artistic approaches associated with different historical periods. The concept of the post-digital provides a framework for examining these relationships without positioning technological innovation as the principal measure of artistic development. Cramer (2015) argues that the term does not designate a historical period following the digital. It describes a critical perspective in which digital technologies are no longer understood primarily through expectations of continuous improvement and in which older and newer media may coexist according to their particular cultural and artistic uses. Post-digitality, in this sense, involves reconsidering technological choices and their aesthetic, material, and cultural implications. It entails neither the rejection of digital technologies nor a return to analogue media.

Salvadori’s practice offers a concrete context in which to examine these questions. In a 2020 interview with Sara Castiglioni for KABUL Magazine, the artist discusses camera selection as part of her creative investigation, referring to devices with different visual characteristics, including a Sony Cyber-shot 3.1-megapixel camera and a Canon PowerShot G9 (Castiglioni 2020). She also describes repeatedly importing and exporting video files to modify their visual quality. These documented procedures suggest an interest in exploring the material characteristics of images as expressive possibilities. Cramer’s perspective is relevant here because it allows such decisions to be considered in terms of their artistic functions without presuming that newer technologies necessarily produce more advanced aesthetic results.

Ferreira and Ribas (2020) situate post-digital aesthetics within broader developments in contemporary audiovisual art, identifying a movement from the exploration of technological failure and glitch towards artistic responses to the ubiquity of digital technologies. Their discussion distinguishes two forms of hybridity: the combination of digital and analogue media, and the intersection of digital and physical environments. These categories offer useful points of comparison with Salvadori’s experimentation, although their applicability cannot be assumed across her entire practice. The analysis must establish their relevance through documented production processes and identifiable audiovisual procedures.

Technological and disciplinary hybridity, however, have histories that precede the post-digital. Elwes (2005), in Video Art: A Guided Tour, traces the development of video art through exchanges with performance, experimental film, conceptual art, sound, and installation. From the 1960s onwards, these interactions challenged established divisions between artistic disciplines and contributed to practices that could not be adequately classified through a single medium. This historical account contextualises Salvadori’s position between video art, documentary, and performance without suggesting a direct genealogical continuity between her work and particular earlier artists.

These disciplinary categories remain analytically useful because they illuminate different aspects of Salvadori’s practice. Video art provides a historical context for experimentation with audiovisual form; documentary directs attention to the recorded situations, people, and relationships represented; and performance raises questions about gestures, encounters, and artistic actions. The post-digital offers a complementary perspective on the technological and material conditions of production and presentation. It is therefore employed in this study as a critical framework, not as a stylistic classification or an explanation that automatically accounts for the sensory characteristics of the works.

The relationship between documentary representation and performance can be examined through Bruzzi’s (2006) New Documentary. Bruzzi challenges understandings of documentary based on the possibility of transparent or unmediated access to reality, emphasising the encounters, negotiations, and interactions involved in its production. Documentary meaning emerges through relationships between filmmakers, filmed subjects, and the circumstances of filming. Performance may participate in this process without necessarily undermining the documentary status of the resulting work.

For the purposes of this article, documentary performativity is distinguished from live audiovisual performance as a mode of artistic presentation. The former concerns how actions, gestures, encounters, and relationships participate in producing and organising documentary representation; the latter concerns the conditions in which audiovisual material is presented or performed. These dimensions may intersect in Salvadori’s projects, but their coexistence must be demonstrated rather than presumed. The mere presence of gestures or actions before a camera is insufficient to establish documentary performativity. The relevant question is how those elements participate in the circumstances through which documentary situations and meanings are constructed.

The embodied dimensions of moving-image experience introduce another theoretical perspective. In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Sobchack (2004) examines the relationship between technologies of representation and bodily existence, challenging approaches that separate visual perception from embodied experience. Her work supports an understanding of audiovisual form in relation to the corporeal conditions of perception. In this study, it informs the examination of rhythm, duration, movement, and sensory engagement as dimensions of audiovisual organisation. Such an approach, however, does not establish how individual spectators actually experience Salvadori’s films.

Marks (2000) develops a more specific account of sensory relationships in The Skin of the Film, where the concept of haptic visuality emerges through an examination of intercultural cinema, memory, displacement, and experiences that may resist conventional visual representation. Haptic visuality describes a mode of looking in which vision engages with qualities associated with touch, including texture, surface, proximity, and materiality. It draws attention to relationships between images, bodily perception, and memory, sometimes complicating the immediate recognition of clearly defined objects. The cultural and political circumstances of Marks’ argument remain integral to its formulation and should not be reduced to a catalogue of visual effects.

Marks’ framework is useful for analysing procedures such as unstable framing, partial visibility, and image texture in Salvadori’s work. Nevertheless, the presence of these characteristics does not automatically establish haptic visuality, nor can formal analysis demonstrate a particular bodily response among spectators. Haptic visuality can illuminate particular perceptual possibilities within Salvadori’s audiovisual compositions, but it does not, by itself, explain how recorded situations and relationships are transformed into documentary constructions. The concept of sensorial documentation, developed below, addresses this relationship between documentary reference, audiovisual organisation, and the articulation of experience.

A further point of comparison is Kasic’s (2020, pp. 173–75) account of sensory vérité, developed within ethnographic filmmaking. Her discussion considers sensory and cognitive dimensions together and raises the problem of whether sensory intensity, without sufficient contextual information, can adequately communicate the lives and practices represented. This qualification is important for the present study. Sensory techniques are not inherently documentary, and their presence does not necessarily produce understanding of a recorded situation. The analytical relevance of sensorial documentation must therefore be established through the relationship between identifiable documentary material, its audiovisual organisation, and the experiences or ideas articulated through that organisation.

In this article, sensorial documentation is proposed as a situated analytical concept for examining how moving-image practices articulate recorded experiences, interpersonal relationships, creative processes, and ideas through audiovisual form. Rather than designating a new documentary genre or mode of spectatorship, it identifies the relationship between three analytical dimensions: (1) the documentary reference provided by identifiable recorded situations; (2) the formal operations through which images, sounds, gestures, and temporalities are selected and recomposed; and (3) the experiential, relational, or conceptual dimensions articulated through that recomposition. Building on, rather than replacing, approaches to haptic visuality, embodied perception, and documentary performativity, the concept examines how these dimensions intersect in the construction of documentary meaning. Its contribution lies not in identifying sensory qualities or performative elements in isolation, but in examining how their audiovisual organisation participates in the construction of documentary meaning through relationships between recorded material, formal procedures, and the experiences or ideas articulated.

Its application therefore requires a demonstrable relationship between documentary material, audiovisual procedures, and the meanings they make perceptible. Fragmentation, sensory intensity, or the presence of collaborators cannot independently establish that relationship.

This approach encompasses different kinds of documented experience. In works concerned with club culture, audiovisual organisation may address the sensory characteristics of collective environments. In other contexts, it may articulate aspects of friendship, artistic collaboration, displacement, or creative processes that are less immediately tangible. These works remain situated constructions shaped by the artist’s perspective and formal decisions. They neither reproduce an original experience nor provide neutral or universal accounts of the situations represented. The analysis consequently addresses possibilities of sensory engagement suggested by audiovisual form, without claiming to establish spectators’ actual responses.

Fragmentation is one of the strategies through which sensorial documentation may operate, but the two concepts are not synonymous. Interruptions of chronological continuity, separations between sound and image, repetitions, and juxtapositions of different gestures, spaces, and temporalities can reorganise the relationships between recorded materials. Their documentary significance depends on what those operations make perceptible within each work. Fragmentation may contribute to the articulation of collective environments, interpersonal relationships, creative processes, or conceptual associations, while also serving other functions, including the disclosure of documentary construction. The comparative analysis therefore examines its operations and functions individually rather than treating it as a uniform aesthetic signature.

Sound is central to this investigation. Boudreault-Fournier (2020, pp. 154–55), drawing on Steven Feld’s concept of acoustemology, considers sound as an active component of audiovisual experience and knowledge. This perspective helps examine how music, voices, sonic continuities, interruptions, and repetitions establish relationships across visually or temporally discontinuous passages. Its use here is an analytical comparison with ethnographic filmmaking, not an assertion that Salvadori’s works employ an ethnographic method.

Collaboration requires similar attention to differences between production contexts. Across Salvadori’s works, it may constitute a documentary subject, shape the encounters involved in filming, or participate more explicitly in the creative process. These possibilities can coexist without implying an equal distribution of artistic authorship. Chalcraft and Hikiji (2020) distinguish participation in filming and artistic production from influence over post-production and the final organisation of an audiovisual work. Their discussion provides an important qualification: visible interpersonal closeness, shared performance, or the inclusion of multiple contributors does not establish shared editorial authority. Claims about collaboration must therefore distinguish what can be observed in the finished work from what is supported by production documentation.

Together, these perspectives establish the analytical framework for the case studies. Post-digital theory addresses technological and material choices, while the history of video art situates disciplinary hybridity within a longer artistic development. Bruzzi’s approach informs the analysis of documentary encounters and performativity; Sobchack and Marks provide distinct perspectives on embodied perception and sensory relationships. Discussions of sensory ethnographic filmmaking, sound, and collaborative production help specify the possibilities and limits of the concept proposed here. Fragmentation remains the principal object of formal analysis, while sensorial documentation provides the interpretative framework for assessing how specific audiovisual operations contribute to documentary meaning through the articulation of recorded experiences, relationships, processes, and ideas. The two concepts are therefore not interchangeable: fragmentation describes identifiable formal procedures, whereas sensorial documentation concerns the documentary significance that such procedures may acquire in relation to particular recorded situations. These relationships will be evaluated across the selected works without presuming a linear artistic progression or uniform spectator responses.

3. Research Design and Methodology

This study adopts a qualitative, comparative audiovisual analysis of five works by Rebecca Salvadori, examining fragmentation as a formal and relational dimension of her moving-image practice. The analysis focuses on visual composition, editing and temporality, sound, and narrative organisation, while considering how gestures, actions, and interpersonal relationships participate in the audiovisual construction of each work.

The corpus was purposively selected according to three criteria: chronological range, diversity of audiovisual approaches, and relevance to the investigation of fragmentation. It covers a seven-year period, from the earliest work in Rave Trilogy (2017) to A Forbidden Distance (2024), allowing recurring formal procedures and possible changes in their functions to be examined over time without presuming a linear artistic progression. Works associated with club culture were selected for their engagement with collective and sensorial environments, while the remaining works extend the comparison to collaborative portraiture, artistic processes, and experiences beyond rave and club culture. The corpus is therefore neither exhaustive nor intended to represent Salvadori’s entire oeuvre.

All five selected works, including the three films comprising Rave Trilogy, were accessed through Vimeo. Rave Trilogy (2017–2020) was publicly available on the artist’s profile, whereas The Sun Has No Shadow (2022), Messengers (2022–ongoing), All We Got Is Us in the Moment (2023), and A Forbidden Distance (2024) were viewed through password-protected links provided by the artist. This access enabled repeated viewings under comparable conditions.

Each work was examined through four stages. The first involved watching each work in its entirety to establish an initial understanding of its structure and audiovisual language. During the second viewing, preliminary notes were taken on relevant formal and narrative elements. The third involved revisiting those observations through pauses and repeated examination of selected passages, allowing details to be analysed and initial interpretations developed. A fourth viewing, conducted after an interval of at least one week, provided an opportunity to reconsider the notes and interpretations. The timestamps of the Vimeo videos were used to identify the passages discussed in the analysis.

The analytical framework comprised four dimensions. Visual composition included framing, shot composition and types, camera angles and movements, lighting, and image texture. Editing and temporality addressed cuts, repetition, shot duration, slow motion, and temporal discontinuity. Sound encompassed music, voices, silence, diegetic and non-diegetic elements, and the presence or absence of synchronisation between sound and image. Narrative organisation concerned continuity, the arrangement of events, narrative progression or its absence, subtitles, on-screen text, and relationships between written language, voice, and image. Across these dimensions, attention was also given to gestures, actions, interactions between filmed subjects, and the presence of the camera. These elements were examined in relation to each work’s audiovisual construction rather than treated as an independent analytical category.

The comparative stage involved identifying procedures recurring across multiple works and features particularly prominent or specific to individual productions. Passages were selected for closer analysis when they demonstrated recurring formal procedures, significant changes in rhythm, editing, or sound-image relationships, or characteristics that helped distinguish one work from another. This procedure allowed fragmentation to be investigated through both its recurrence across the corpus and its specific documentary and relational functions within each work. The concept of sensorial documentation was applied by examining the relationship between three aspects of each selected passage: the identifiable documentary situation or material, the audiovisual procedures through which it was reorganised, and the experiential, relational, or conceptual dimensions articulated by those procedures. This approach made it possible to distinguish instances in which fragmentation contributed to documentary meaning from those in which it primarily served other formal or narrative functions. The analysis did not assume that sensory qualities necessarily produced particular responses among spectators.

Interviews, texts, and additional research materials provided by the artist were used to contextualise production processes, clarify artistic decisions where documented, and support interpretations developed through audiovisual analysis. Statements by Salvadori were distinguished from the author’s formal observations and analytical conclusions. The study also differentiates interactions visible in the works from production arrangements established through interviews, artist statements, or other contextual sources. Accordingly, claims about participation in creative or editorial decisions are limited to what the available documentation substantiates. On-screen participation alone is not treated as evidence of shared authorship.

The author’s position as both a researcher and a DJ with direct experience of rave culture informs the interpretation of works associated with club environments. Familiarity with their sonic, bodily, and social dimensions provides an experiential point of reference for examining their audiovisual representation. This situated perspective is acknowledged as part of the research’s interpretative conditions; it does not constitute evidence of Salvadori’s intentions or of spectators’ experiences.

Although the author attended Not A Word From Me (2025), a live performance by Salvadori with Lucy Railton and Charlie Hope at Semibreve Festival, it was excluded from the analytical corpus. The performance was attended only once, preventing the application of the repeated-viewing procedure used for the five selected works.

The study is interpretative, grounding its conclusions in formal observations, comparative analysis, and theoretical considerations while recognising the possibility of alternative readings. It does not include interviews, questionnaires, or systematic observation of spectators. References to embodied or sensorial spectatorship consequently concern perceptual possibilities suggested by audiovisual organisation, not empirically documented audience responses. Furthermore, because the analysis was conducted using Vimeo versions, its findings cannot be directly extended to the spatial, acoustic, or collective conditions of live performances and installations. These limitations indicate possibilities for future research involving direct observation and empirical investigation of audience experience.

4. Case Studies

4.1. Club Culture, Collective Memory and Fragmented Documentation

The first group of works comprises Rave Trilogy (2017–2020) and The Sun Has No Shadow (2022), both concerned with electronic music communities, collective participation, and the documentation of ephemeral social environments. Their comparison examines how fragmentation operates through visual composition, sound, editing, and temporal organisation, and whether similar procedures acquire different documentary functions across the two works. The chronological order facilitates this comparison without presupposing a linear development in Salvadori’s artistic practice.

Sarah Thornton defines club culture as “the colloquial expression given to youth cultures for whom dance clubs and their eighties offshoot, raves, are the symbolic axis and working social hub” (Thornton 1996, p. 14). Clubs and raves thus constitute social environments in which participation contributes to forms of identification and belonging. Thornton also observes that these environments frequently generate “ad hoc communities with fluid boundaries which may come together and dissolve in a single summer or endure for a few years” (Thornton 1996, p. 15). Their transitory character is relevant to the documentary dimension of Salvadori’s work: audiovisual recordings retain traces of collective encounters that may otherwise remain ephemeral. Such traces can contribute to their documentation and subsequent interpretation, although they neither preserve the experience itself nor constitute an exhaustive archive of the communities represented.

St John (2004) approaches rave culture through the interrelation of electronic music, dance, light, technology, and collective participation. He identifies the dance floor as its principal site of action, describing it as “a kinaesthetic maelstrom” (p. 2). This emphasis on bodily movement and shared spatial experience provides a context for examining how Salvadori represents dancers and club environments. In the works considered here, attention frequently shifts from identifiable individuals towards gestures, bodies, movements, and their relationships with sound and space. These formal choices can be examined in relation to the collective dimensions of rave culture without assuming that the films reproduce the experience of participation.

St John also describes rave culture in terms of a “synaesthetic community” (St John 2004, p. 29), highlighting the interaction of sensory dimensions within electronic music environments. Sound, light, bodily movement, and spatial proximity contribute to experiences that cannot be adequately described through visual information alone. This perspective is useful for analysing Salvadori’s combinations of image texture, rhythm, sonic density, and bodily movement. The question is how these elements are organised audiovisually and what aspects of the recorded environments become perceptible through that organisation.

The temporal dimension of these environments offers a further point of comparison. St John characterises rave through “a non-linear celebration of presence” (St John 2004, p. 31), associating collective participation with experiences that unsettle conventional temporal distinctions. In Salvadori’s films, procedures such as repetition, slow motion, asynchronous sound, and discontinuous editing can be investigated for the ways they reorganise the temporal relationships between recorded events. Their significance, however, must be established through the particular sequences in which they occur. The following analyses therefore consider how fragmentation contributes to the documentation of collective environments while attending to the different functions it assumes in each work.

4.1.1. Rave Trilogy (2017–2020)

Rave Trilogy (2017–2020) comprises three films associated with electronic music culture: Final Sheffield, filmed at No Bounds Festival in Sheffield; Inside Fold, concerned with London’s FOLD club; and Desert Rave, recorded in Morocco’s Agafay Desert. Across the trilogy, conversations, subtitles, music, bodily gestures, and images are combined without consistently establishing their spatial or temporal relationships. Although the films share this approach to audiovisual discontinuity, they employ it for different documentary purposes.

In Final Sheffield, fragmentation is closely connected to the disclosure of documentary production. The opening frame identifies the film, gives its duration as 10′48″ and its date as 2017–2018, and states “commissioned by No Bounds Festival”. The subsequent sequence introduces festival imagery alongside fragments of conversations concerning how the documentary should be made. An image of a cloudy sky carries the festival logo and the inscription “No Bounds Festival 2017”, while a subtitle reads “make a video on what you think is going to portray it creatively and nicely”. A faint, apparently male voice is audible, although its speaker cannot be identified. The festival is thus introduced through a statement about its representation rather than through explanatory narration. The opening establishes the existence of a commission but does not identify the speaker or demonstrate their involvement in commissioning the film.

The montage then moves between dancing audiences, lights, and silhouettes as subtitles refer to festival headliners. A question appears: “so you taking any still as well or just video?”, followed by the answer “just video”, presented without a clearly audible corresponding voice. Immediately afterwards, the moving footage gives way to a relatively rapid succession of photographs or still frames. The film does not establish whether these are photographs or frames extracted from recordings. Their juxtaposition with the conversation nevertheless creates a formal contrast between the recording medium being discussed and the presentation of images through interrupted movement.

Moving images of the audience return alongside an exchange about lenses used for filming. Although voices are audible, their attribution remains uncertain. Following a brief black image, “a film by Rebecca Salvadori” appears over a dancefloor with flashing lights and moving bodies, while another musical layer gradually overlaps the soundtrack. The authorial title therefore follows conversations about production decisions, incorporating aspects of the documentary’s preparation into its opening sequence. These exchanges indicate the presence of interlocutors involved in discussing the film but do not establish shared artistic authorship.

This incorporation of production-related conversations can be considered through Bruzzi’s (2006) account of documentary representation as shaped by encounters and negotiations. Final Sheffield makes selected circumstances of its construction part of the finished work. The discussion of lenses also provides a limited connection to the post-digital framework: the reference to equipment does not itself establish a post-digital aesthetic, but it makes technological choices visible within the film’s account of its production.

The separation between statements and identifiable speakers continues beyond the opening. Reflections concerning queer politics, family structures, artistic intentions, and festival organisation appear through captions whose attribution may be delayed or remain unresolved. For example, the statement “I feel like No Bounds represents a very personal statement about how I see the landscape at this moment in my life” precedes its association with a male voice. This interval changes how the statement is encountered, initially presenting its content without an identifiable speaking subject. Such displacement complicates documentary identification, although the selection and arrangement of the statements remain editorial decisions.

At approximately 5′12″, a black screen presents a written exchange about the possible incorporation of footage recorded by Tim Glasby alongside Salvadori’s material. Glasby is introduced only in relation to recordings that might be included; neither his relationship to the festival nor the provenance of particular shots is established. Although the subsequent montage suggests that some of his footage may have entered the finished film, the sequence does not verify this. The exchange documents a proposed contribution and discloses a production relationship without demonstrating shared editorial authority.

Alongside these references to documentary construction, Final Sheffield develops discontinuities between sound and image. Voices, environmental sounds, electronic music, and reversed speech do not always maintain stable synchronisation with the images. Quiet passages contrast with dense musical sequences, while still or slowed images coexist with energetic soundtracks. In passages involving dancers and musicians, slow motion extends bodily gestures without simply following the musical tempo. These differences establish distinct rhythms for visible movement and audible sound. Boudreault-Fournier’s (2020) discussion of sound as an active dimension of audiovisual knowledge helps clarify how these relationships contribute to the film’s documentary construction.

Two functions of fragmentation can therefore be distinguished in Final Sheffield. Production-related conversations and messages disclose aspects of how the documentary is made, while the differentiated organisation of movement, music, and duration constructs an audiovisual interpretation of the festival’s sensory environment. The first concerns documentary performativity; the second contributes to sensorial documentation. Both operate through fragmentation, but they address different aspects of the recorded situation.

Inside Fold shifts the emphasis towards the relationship between individual testimony, collective experience, and cinematic temporality. Its opening textual reflection describes the club as a potentially anonymous environment in which participation need not conform to a dominant culture or prescribed behaviour, allowing attention to concentrate on sound. This remains a participant’s account rather than independent evidence that the venue is socially non-hierarchical. Its placement nevertheless frames the subsequent juxtaposition of individual and collective imagery.

Another textual passage evokes entering an “audible field” and processes of “folding and unfolding” associated with sound and collective experience. These reflections precede sustained images of dancing bodies, establishing a relationship between the participants’ descriptions and the film’s representation of movement. Slow motion extends selected gestures beyond their recorded pace, separating cinematic duration from musical rhythm. The audiovisual organisation thus approaches qualities evoked by the testimony without reproducing the participant’s experience directly.

As in Final Sheffield, statements are sometimes separated from identifiable speakers. In Inside Fold, however, this procedure primarily concerns the relationship between individual accounts and representations of the club as a collective environment. Repetition introduces another dimension: particular shots recur at separated moments, sometimes accompanied by different sonic material. The opening reflections about anonymity and the “audible field” also return near the conclusion. Their recurrence after the intervening images and sounds allows the initial statements to be encountered in a changed audiovisual context, establishing relationships between different moments of the film.

These returns complicate a straightforwardly linear account of the club experience without necessarily eliminating chronological progression or mnemonic associations. They may resonate with repetition in electronic music, although formal equivalence between musical and cinematic repetition would require a more detailed rhythmic comparison. Inside Fold is therefore particularly relevant to the study’s argument because fragmentation connects discourse about collective experience with bodily movement and the temporal organisation of audiovisual material.

Desert Rave relocates the documentary encounter to Morocco’s Agafay Desert and places particular emphasis on accounts of altered temporal experience. Its opening testimony describes rave as an extension of the present, associating the stretching of a moment with utopia. Another participant describes losing awareness of measurable time. These statements express situated experiences rather than universal characteristics of rave participation. The film places them in relation to slow-motion imagery, prolonged gestures, and variations in editing rhythm, creating contrasts between the recorded duration of actions and the temporal qualities described by the speakers. This relationship provides a concrete instance of sensorial documentation: audiovisual form explores experiential dimensions articulated through testimony without claiming to reproduce those experiences.

Other statements characterise rave in “quasi-religious” or “quasi-mystical” terms and suggest that participants share a similar understanding of life. Salvadori juxtaposes these accounts with dancing bodies, close framings, and variations in sonic intensity. Neither the statements nor the images, however, establish that the gathering is objectively ritualistic or socially homogeneous. They remain individual perspectives mediated through audiovisual selection and arrangement. Close images of faces, hands, eyes, and isolated gestures also foreground bodily proximity and visual surface without consistently developing into identifiable portraits. Marks’ (2000) concept of haptic visuality offers a perspective on these perceptual qualities, although close framing alone cannot establish a particular response among spectators.

At approximately 27′37″, an extreme close-up shows a participant speaking and pointing towards the camera. A subtitle reads, “Should I answer your questions looking at the camera?” His gestures and lip movements are visible, but his voice is not heard. The sequence separates the visible act of speaking from the written question and its absent audible expression. At the same time, the participant explicitly acknowledges the filming situation and negotiates how to address the camera.

This encounter connects audiovisual fragmentation with documentary performativity. The question concerns the conditions under which a documentary statement is produced, while its presentation disrupts the expected correspondence between speech, text, and image. Bruzzi’s (2006) approach helps situate this negotiation within documentary representation. The participant’s awareness of the camera does not, however, establish control over the completed film: the selection of the shot, the subtitle, and the absence of audible speech remain editorial decisions.

Desert Rave consequently brings two dimensions of fragmentation into relation. The organisation of testimony, movement, and duration constructs an audiovisual approach to experiences described by participants, while the encounter at 27′37″ makes the conditions of documentary recording perceptible. The distinction is significant because the film’s sensory treatment of rave and its disclosure of the filming situation contribute differently to documentary representation.

Across the Rave Trilogy, comparable audiovisual procedures acquire distinct functions. Final Sheffield foregrounds documentary construction through production-related exchanges; Inside Fold relates individual testimony to collective imagery and temporal recurrence; and Desert Rave connects accounts of altered time with audiovisual duration while also exposing negotiations between participant and camera. The comparison demonstrates that fragmentation cannot automatically be equated with sensorial documentation or documentary performativity. Its significance depends on the relationships established between specific recorded situations and their audiovisual organisation. In each film, these relationships remain mediated by decisions concerning framing, sound, editing, and the presentation of testimony.

4.1.2. The Sun Has No Shadow (2022)

The Sun Has No Shadow (2022) brings together footage recorded by Rebecca Salvadori over approximately ten years, combining encounters, conversations, electronic music events, urban environments, and personal reflections without reconstructing a continuous chronology. Moramarco (2023) describes the film as emerging from the recomposition of Salvadori’s personal archive. Its documentary material is organised through associations between images, sounds, gestures, and reflections on identity, presence, and participation. Unlike the relatively delimited environments examined in Rave Trilogy, the film draws connections across dispersed moments in the artist’s experience of London’s electronic music communities. This archival dimension makes the relationship between recording and subsequent recomposition central to its documentary construction.

Commissioned by Adriana Leanza for Synchronous Errors (2022), the film was shot, directed, and edited by Salvadori. Its credits acknowledge Charlie Hope’s lighting installation, voice recordings by Kristian Craig Robinson, and sound mixing by Michele Bianchin, alongside numerous participants, conversations, and musical contributions. These acknowledgements document the involvement of different people in the production without establishing shared authorship of its direction or editing. The credits also identify sources for some quotations and reflections, including SAUNA Diaries (2019), attributed to Salvadori. They do not, however, conclusively establish the authorship of every statement appearing in the subtitles, a distinction that becomes relevant to the film’s treatment of testimony.

The opening sequence introduces identity and alterity through a separation between the visible body and the identifiable speaking subject. Following the title, a nocturnal image with a greenish, night-vision-like appearance shows a person wearing a white T-shirt. The face is heavily pixelated and the voice electronically distorted. Subtitles communicate a reflection on the edgelands, peripheral territories where industrial infrastructure, roads, and forms of wilderness coexist. References to London’s margins, including the elevated A13 motorway, connect geographical exteriority with questions of displacement. At approximately 1:08, the film cuts to slow-motion footage of a person walking ahead of the camera. The voice continues as the subtitles temporarily disappear before returning with a reflection on encountering the Other within oneself and becoming different through experiences of exteriority.

The audiovisual presentation complicates the identification of the speaking subject. Pixelation prevents facial recognition, vocal distortion obscures the voice, and the intermittent subtitles interrupt the availability of the spoken reflection as written information. The walking figure does not provide an identifiable source for the discourse. Instead, body, voice, and text remain connected without forming a conventional interview. The film does not establish why the speaker’s identity is obscured, so these operations cannot be attributed to a specific intention to protect anonymity. What they demonstrably produce is a documentary statement whose mediation remains perceptible. Identity is addressed through both the content of the reflection and the difficulty of connecting that reflection to a recognisable individual.

The opening discussion also informs the representation of urban space. Industrial landscapes, peripheral areas, interiors, corridors, reflections, bodies, and nightclub environments appear without consistently forming geographically coherent routes. Read alongside the reflection on the edgelands, these fragments suggest an experiential geography in which distinctions between interiority and exteriority, familiarity and otherness, become unstable. This interpretation arises from the relationship between the opening discourse and the subsequent montage; it does not imply that every location carries an identical symbolic meaning.

The tension between inhabiting an experience and recording it becomes explicit between approximately 4:40 and 5:28. Underexposed footage shows a dancefloor, with figures appearing as silhouettes against the venue’s lighting. Electronic music and a shout from the crowd establish an ongoing event, while a subtitle distinguishes being present in a moment from producing that moment. No identifiable speaking voice accompanies the statement. As the image fades to black, the soundtrack continues and the subtitle remains briefly visible. A subsequent statement associates the production of a moment with a form of consciousness that may interrupt immediate presence.

The sequence then moves through still images: a green light, a figure photographed from behind with raised arms, a black-and-white image of people raising their arms, a blurred coloured light, and red-toned dancefloor imagery. The subtitles continue to articulate the desire for presence while electronic music connects the otherwise discontinuous images. At approximately 5:14, another sonic element enters and moving footage resumes, following people across the dancefloor in greenish, night-vision-like images. Around 5:28, a brief reversal of movement interrupts the footage’s apparent forward progression before it resumes.

The reflection on presence thus acquires a formal dimension. The alternation between stillness and movement, the continuation of sound across black images, and the persistence of subtitles without audible speech establish different temporal relationships between the recorded event and its presentation. The reversal at 5:28 makes the manipulation of recorded duration especially apparent. These operations foreground the audiovisual construction of the recorded event, complicating the impression of unmediated access to collective presence.

The statements may resonate with Salvadori’s position as someone who documents environments in which she also participates, particularly given the inclusion of her own writings among the credited sources. Yet the film does not identify the author of this specific reflection. It should therefore not be treated as a confirmed autobiographical statement. Its uncertain attribution allows the passage to be considered as a question about the relationship between lived experience and its documentation without assigning that question definitively to the filmmaker.

Bruzzi’s (2006) understanding of documentary as a practice shaped through encounters and negotiations provides a framework for interpreting this tension. The sequence makes the relationship between participation, recording, and representation an explicit concern of the finished film. This does not mean that the camera produces the collective event or that filming and participating are equivalent activities. The distinction expressed in the subtitles is precisely what makes their relationship significant: attention to producing an image may alter how presence is experienced, while the resulting film constructs another encounter with the recorded moment.

The visual heterogeneity of The Sun Has No Shadow extends this concern with mediation. Moving footage, still photographs, pixelated portraits, graphic interventions, and abstract textures coexist with images marked by different recording conditions. Unstable focus, darkness, blurred figures, close framing, and variations in colour complicate recognition and prevent the establishment of a uniform visual surface. These visible characteristics do not identify particular cameras, formats, or processing techniques. They do, however, demonstrate that differences in image quality, movement, and legibility are retained within the composition.

This approach is pertinent to Cramer’s (2015) account of post-digital practices, in which technological choices are considered beyond simple distinctions between digital and analogue media or assumptions of continuous technical improvement. The film’s relevance to this framework lies in its recomposition of heterogeneous audiovisual materials, whose perceptible differences contribute to its organisation. Marks’ (2000) concept of haptic visuality offers another perspective on moments in which texture, light, proximity, and indistinct visual information become prominent. Neither framework establishes that technical heterogeneity necessarily produces a particular sensory response: the analysis concerns observable formal characteristics and the perceptual possibilities they suggest.

The relationship between individual testimony and collective space becomes particularly evident in a later sequence centred on FOLD. At approximately 20:06, the club appears relatively empty, with a small number of people inside. Its architecture, lighting equipment, and spatial arrangement are comparatively legible. Footage at 20:35 presents a contrasting situation: a crowded dancefloor where bodies move in slow motion beneath changing coloured lights. The juxtaposition reveals different states of the same environment and introduces the relationships between physical space, collective activity, and individual experience that the following sequence develops.

From approximately 20:52, images overlap and sonic elements accumulate. A subtitle presents a personal statement about having moved to London because of FOLD, without an accompanying audible voice. As the footage continues in slow motion, the soundtrack develops into a sustained, drone-like sound. Around 21:11, the image disappears into black while the subtitle remains visible. The text then disappears, but the sound continues, preceding a red light and blurred images of the dancefloor. Testimony is consequently distributed across discontinuous visual, textual, and sonic elements, with no stable correspondence between the statement and an identifiable speaker.

At approximately 21:23 and 21:30, individuals appear to speak, but neither their voices nor subtitles communicating their words are provided. From around 21:48, images of these encounters are superimposed on dancefloor footage, placing individual figures and collective activity within the same visual field. At 22:06, a subtitle conveys a reflection on being oneself in the club without feeling judged, again without an audible corresponding voice. These arrangements retain the participants’ visible presence while withholding aspects of the verbal testimony ordinarily associated with documentary interviews.

The relationship changes at approximately 22:35. During informal exchanges involving laughter, introductions, and playful interactions, voices become audible and subtitles disappear. When more reflective statements return, the voices are again withdrawn and subtitles reappear. This recurring alternation differentiates the presentation of social interaction from that of introspective testimony. The former is encountered through recorded voices and gestures; the latter through written statements situated within the film’s sonic environment. The procedure makes the editorial mediation of testimony perceptible, consistent with Bruzzi’s (2006) account of documentary representation as constructed through the filmmaking process.

The statements about moving to London because of FOLD and being able to express oneself within the club connect individual life trajectories to the collective environment shown in the images. They remain situated accounts, however, and cannot establish that all participants experience the venue similarly. Their documentary significance emerges from their placement alongside crowded dancefloors, visible interpersonal exchanges, and images of the club’s physical space. The montage establishes relationships between these materials without converting individual testimony into a uniform account of communal identity.

Sound is central to this construction. The sustained drone continues across superimpositions, black screens, changes in shot, and passages of inaudible speech. It establishes a temporal continuity that the visual montage repeatedly interrupts. Fragmentation here depends on the differentiated organisation of sound, image, and text, not simply on the frequency of cuts. Boudreault-Fournier’s (2020) discussion of sound as an active dimension of audiovisual knowledge helps clarify its function in connecting dispersed documentary materials. Sobchack’s (2004) phenomenological perspective also provides a basis for considering how duration, rhythm, and movement may contribute to embodied perception, without allowing conclusions about actual spectator responses.

The film’s archival organisation extends these relationships beyond the individual sequences. Recordings made at different moments coexist through associations of gesture, sound, visual texture, and recurring reflections. The montage does not reconstruct a chronological history of London’s electronic music communities. It establishes new relationships among recorded materials, making the past available through a composition produced retrospectively. Memory can therefore be understood as an organising dimension of the film, provided that this claim refers to its recomposition of recordings rather than to a demonstrated collective memory shared by all those represented.

The alternation between close portraits, partially obscured faces, crowds, and peripheral urban spaces similarly connects individual presence to wider environments. At times, superimposition brings these scales into the same image. Participants are neither consistently presented through explanatory portraits nor reduced to interchangeable figures within the crowd. Their gestures and statements acquire significance through the situations and relationships in which the film places them, while remaining distinct perspectives mediated by Salvadori’s editorial decisions.

The Sun Has No Shadow consequently extends the study’s concept of sensorial documentation beyond the representation of individual club events. Its archival materials are reorganised through discontinuities of image, sound, text, and duration, articulating relationships between personal testimony, collective environments, and the experience of recording. The opening’s obscured speaker, the reflection on presence between 4:40 and 5:28, and the FOLD sequence between 20:06 and 22:35 demonstrate different functions of this organisation. Together, they show how documentary materials from dispersed encounters can be recomposed into a sensorial and relational audiovisual construction without claiming to reproduce the experiences from which those materials originated.

The distinction between Rave Trilogy and The Sun Has No Shadow lies not simply in the range of material assembled, but in the documentary functions assigned to fragmentation. In Rave Trilogy, discontinuities operate primarily within relatively delimited events, relating participants’ testimonies, bodily movements, and audiovisual rhythms to particular club environments, while occasionally exposing the circumstances of filming. In The Sun Has No Shadow, fragmentation operates retrospectively across recordings accumulated over approximately a decade, establishing associations between otherwise separate encounters and making the relationship between participation, memory, and documentation a central concern. Whereas the trilogy predominantly reorganises the representation of particular collective situations, the later film also examines how an accumulated personal archive can be reconstituted into a documentary account. The comparison therefore demonstrates that similar formal procedures may serve different documentary purposes according to the temporal scope and organisation of the recorded material.

4.2. Performance, Collaboration and Sensorial Documentation

The second group comprises Messengers (2022–ongoing), All We Got Is Us in the Moment (2023), and A Forbidden Distance (2024). These works bring artistic collaboration into the foreground, examining relationships developed through musical performance, improvisation, conversation, and shared creative processes. While the previous case studies concentrated on the audiovisual documentation of club environments and collective participation, the following analyses consider how artistic encounters themselves become documentary material.

The relationship between filming and collaboration differs across the three projects. In some instances, audiovisual recording forms part of an event organised specifically for the work; in others, the film recomposes encounters and processes developed through existing artistic relationships. These distinctions are important for examining documentary performativity and sensorial documentation without assuming that collaboration necessarily entails shared authorship. The analyses therefore consider what can be observed in the films alongside the production circumstances documented by the artist and other available sources.

4.2.1. Messengers (2022–Ongoing)

Messengers incorporates the construction of artistic encounters into the circumstances of its filming. Through conversations, musical improvisation, and public presentation, the project examines how moving images can document situations in whose development audiovisual recording also participates. This relationship distinguishes it from works primarily concerned with recording pre-existing musical environments.

Commissioned by PAF Olomouc, the Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art, Messengers began in 2022 with a temporary set and open laboratory at Konvikt, a former Jesuit monastery in the Czech Republic (CIRCA 2024). The initial event brought together musicians Kenichi Iwasa and Maxwell Sterling, lighting artist Charlie Hope, writer and curator Elaine Tam, and photographer Henerico Rossi. Salvadori filmed one-to-one conversations, staged situations (mise-en-scènes), and live performances involving these participants, while the laboratory was also presented as an event with an audience (CIRCA 2024; Beta Architecture Biennial 2024). The project subsequently developed through further encounters and presentations, including material featuring GAISTER in 2023 and a presentation at the Beta Architecture Biennial in 2024 (Beta Architecture Biennial 2024). These circumstances establish Messengers as an ongoing project rather than a single, definitively completed film.

The laboratory complicates the distinction between preparation, artistic event, and documentary recording. Conversations and performances took place within situations organised for the project, making filming one of the activities constituting the encounters. Collaboration is therefore evident in the production of the documentary material, although the participation of multiple artists does not establish shared authorship of the finished audiovisual composition. This distinction between collaborative activity and editorial authority remains important throughout the analysis.

In an interview with Láska (2025), Salvadori discusses the relationship between Messengers and The Sun Has No Shadow, explaining that the two projects were initially conceived as chapters within a broader investigation of music and its surrounding experiences. While The Sun Has No Shadow concentrated on rituals associated with club culture, Messengers became increasingly concerned with the transitory conditions of participation and the biographies of musicians. Salvadori also describes its growing relationship with live performance. These statements contextualise the project’s changing form without requiring the two works to be understood as stages in a linear artistic progression.

The film opens with the question “Where do we belong?”, initially presented through subtitles accompanied by slow-motion images and the sustained sound of a wind instrument. The question is subsequently articulated in voice-over, while the relationship between written language, audible speech, and instrumental sound changes. Its meaning is not developed through a continuous explanatory account or resolved through a conventional narrative progression. Instead, the question remains connected to the encounters that follow, with language operating simultaneously as documentary discourse and audiovisual material.

This opening acquires further significance through the project’s conversations about friendship, music, artistic practice, and relationships with London. Such subjects connect individual biographies to shared creative environments without establishing a homogeneous collective identity. Felice Moramarco’s discussion of Messengers similarly emphasises an interpersonal space in which distinct subjectivities encounter one another. Belonging can therefore be examined through the relationships made perceptible by the film rather than through an assumption that participation eliminates individual differences.

Salvadori’s position within these encounters becomes explicit in the statement “I can’t stop filming.” The remark acknowledges recording as an activity taking place within the represented situation. Handheld movements, slow rotations, changes in framing, and adjustments to the participants further reveal the camera’s mobile position. These characteristics do not establish that each movement influences the behaviour of those filmed, but they make the act of recording perceptible as a situated activity. The alternation between proximity to individuals and wider views of shared environments also prevents the laboratory from being presented as a space observed from a single, stable perspective.

Bruzzi’s (2006) account of documentary representation as shaped through encounters and negotiations is relevant to this relationship. In Messengers, the camera records artistic situations while occupying a position within their production. The film’s self-reflexive elements do not erase the distinction between documentation and performance; they make the relationship between these activities available for examination. Fragmented framing and mobile perspectives contribute to this process by retaining traces of the filmmaker’s changing position in relation to the participants.

A particularly revealing passage begins at approximately seventeen minutes, when subtitles introduce a reflection on stroboscopic lighting. The text describes the alternation between illumination and darkness as a disruption of perceptual continuity and bodily awareness, culminating in the suggestion that a participant may experience themselves as “a grain of the movie.” The formulation connects a technical property of lighting to the relationship between bodily movement and cinematic perception.

Stroboscopic illumination makes movement visible through successive intervals rather than continuous observation. Within the film, the reflection on this process introduces a relationship between the interruption of light and the temporal organisation of moving images. Yet fragmentation cannot be attributed exclusively to the strobe: editing, framing, and sound also organise the duration and perceptibility of gestures. The sequence is therefore significant for the interaction between a verbal reflection on perception and audiovisual procedures that make discontinuity a formal concern. It does not establish that performers or spectators necessarily undergo the same sensory experience.

Marks’ (2000) concept of haptic visuality offers a perspective on moments of visual instability, proximity, and partial visibility, but the stroboscopic passage should not be classified as haptic solely because recognition is interrupted. Its more specific contribution to the present argument lies in the connection between the participant’s description of perception and the film’s organisation of light, movement, and time. The sequence thus makes an experiential idea available through both documentary testimony and audiovisual construction.

The project’s successive presentations introduce a further distinction between its modes of production and reception. Messengers has circulated through screenings, live performances, and site-specific artistic situations. These formats do not imply that every presentation involves live manipulation of images or direct audience interaction. During the original laboratory, spectators were present while artistic encounters were created and filmed; at subsequent presentations, audiences may encounter previously recorded and edited material alongside additional performative or spatial arrangements. The conditions of participation therefore differ between the event of production and later presentations.

Elaine M. L. Tam’s (2024) writing on Messengers addresses vulnerability and the unstable boundary between performing and witnessing, particularly relevant to the original laboratory and its audience. Her account helps contextualise the relationships between participants and observers without establishing that spectators in later presentations occupy equivalent positions. Similarly, Chalcraft and Hikiji’s (2020) distinction between participation in audiovisual production and authority over post-production provides a necessary qualification: collective artistic encounters can shape the material recorded without implying that all participants determine its final organisation.

The post-digital dimension of Messengers can be examined through these changing relationships between recording, audiovisual composition, and presentation. In Cramer’s (2015) framework, post-digitality concerns the cultural and artistic uses of technologies rather than technological novelty or a simple opposition between analogue and digital media. The project is relevant because recorded images move between different functions: documenting a temporary artistic situation, becoming material for an audiovisual work, and entering subsequent performative configurations. These transformations concern the relationships between media and artistic practices; they do not, by themselves, establish specific technical procedures or forms of audience participation.

Messengers consequently extends the concept of sensorial documentation towards artistic situations in which the production of documentary material is itself part of a collaborative event. Its conversations, performances, gestures, and recorded encounters retain documentary specificity while being reorganised through framing, sound, interruption, and duration. The question of belonging, the acknowledgement of filming, and the reflection on stroboscopic perception demonstrate distinct ways in which this reorganisation makes interpersonal and experiential dimensions perceptible. Unlike the club environments examined earlier, the collaborative situation is not only represented by the film but also constitutes part of the circumstances through which its documentary material comes into being.

4.2.2. All We Got Is Us in the Moment (2023)

All We Got Is Us in the Moment (2023) shifts the focus from the collective laboratory of Messengers towards an existing artistic and personal relationship. Developed in collaboration with musician and MC Coby Sey, who has worked with Salvadori since 2017, the film is described as “part visual mixtape, part experimental documentary” (Dampfzentrale 2024). Its official presentation identifies the friendship and collaboration between the two artists as central to the project. This context is significant because the relationship represented in the film also precedes and informs its production.

The work approaches portraiture without organising Sey’s identity through a comprehensive biography, chronology, or account of artistic achievements. Instead, gestures, rehearsals, performances, conversations, and moments of shared attention provide the material through which his presence is constructed. The resulting portrait does not establish a definitive account of its subject but brings different situations and interactions into relation through audiovisual composition.

The opening sequence introduces this approach through slow-motion images of Sey performing under intense stroboscopic lighting. Moments of complete darkness repeatedly interrupt the images, while his voice becomes fragmented through repetition, layering, and rhythmic displacement. Spoken language gradually enters the surrounding musical texture, complicating the distinction between voice as testimony and voice as sound. These operations transform the recorded performance while retaining its connection to Sey’s bodily and vocal presence.

The stroboscopic lighting recalls a procedure examined in Messengers, although it serves a different function here. The alternation between illumination and darkness interrupts sustained observation of the performing body, while slow motion extends the duration of its gestures. Sey’s presence is consequently constructed through partial visibility and temporal transformation rather than uninterrupted visual access. These characteristics establish a formal relationship between bodily proximity, movement, and the instability of the portrait, without demonstrating a particular response among spectators.

A comparable discontinuity affects the presentation of language. Subtitles sometimes appear without an immediately identifiable speaker, occupying an ambiguous position between dialogue, reflection, and textual composition. Their separation from visible speaking subjects complicates the attribution of documentary statements and makes editorial mediation perceptible. This uncertainty does not establish that the statements express a collective voice or that individual authorship disappears; it indicates that the film does not consistently provide the conventional correspondences through which documentary speech is identified.

Salvadori’s own appearance before the camera introduces a further dimension of the portrait. Although brief, these moments make her participation in the recorded environment visible, complicating the separation between filmmaker and filmed subject. The relationship with Sey is therefore not represented exclusively from an external observational position. Her presence provides evidence of participation in the filmed situations but does not, by itself, establish how creative decisions or editorial authority were distributed between the collaborators.

Friendship operates both as a documented relationship and as part of the circumstances in which the film was produced. The artists’ longstanding collaboration provides context for interpreting their encounters, while gestures, performances, and moments of interaction offer audiovisual evidence of their proximity. Nevertheless, familiarity cannot be treated as a guarantee of documentary authenticity or unrestricted access to another person’s experience. The portrait remains shaped by the selection and arrangement of recorded material, and its relational dimension must be examined through those operations rather than inferred from the participants’ presumed emotional states.

The title All We Got Is Us in the Moment foregrounds shared presence, but the film’s temporal organisation complicates any notion of immediacy. Slow motion, repetition, rhythmic displacement, and discontinuous editing transform the duration of recorded encounters. Moments of performance, listening, improvisation, and interaction are therefore presented through a retrospective audiovisual construction. The film articulates aspects of shared presence through its organisation of recorded material rather than reproducing the original experience as an unmediated event.

Within the framework of this study, All We Got Is Us in the Moment offers a distinct instance of sensorial documentation through relational portraiture. Fragmented images, voices, gestures, and temporalities articulate aspects of an existing friendship and artistic collaboration, while Salvadori’s appearance introduces her own position within the recorded encounters. Unlike the collective environments of Rave Trilogy or the laboratory situations of Messengers, the documentary material here emerges from a relationship that is simultaneously a condition of production and a subject of representation. Its audiovisual organisation makes that relationship perceptible without equating interpersonal proximity with shared editorial authorship.

4.2.3. A Forbidden Distance (2024)

A Forbidden Distance (2024) extends Salvadori’s collaborative practice into questions of displacement, identity, and the relationships that artistic encounters can establish across geographical and cultural contexts. The work brings together Saint Abdullah (Iranian–Canadian brothers Mohammad and Mehdi Mehrabani-Yeganeh), Irish musician and sound designer Eomac (Ian McDonnell), and Salvadori. It was developed within The Crossing, a project commissioned by Berlin Atonal, Unsound, Semibreve, and Sónar through the European initiative TIMES. Unlike the longstanding relationship examined in All We Got Is Us in the Moment, the project brought together artists working with one another for the first time (TIMES 2024). Its commissioning framework identifies political borders, migration, and the relationship between displacement and identity as central concerns. These circumstances provide a context for examining collaboration between distinct artistic and biographical perspectives without presuming a pre-existing collective identity.

The work brings together family recordings, documentary footage of rehearsals and conversations, interviews, sound, and material produced during the collaborative process. These elements are not arranged into a continuous narrative of migration or artistic development. Instead, the audiovisual composition establishes relationships between different temporalities, places, and experiences while retaining their distinctions. Collaboration can thus be examined through the encounter between heterogeneous materials and perspectives, without assuming that their juxtaposition produces a unified account of displacement.

Among these materials are home videos recorded by Saint Abdullah’s family in Canada and sent to relatives in Iran. Their significance extends beyond their subsequent inclusion in the film: before becoming part of the artwork, the recordings circulated as a means of maintaining familial relationships across national borders. Their incorporation into A Forbidden Distance changes their context of presentation, bringing images originally exchanged within a family into a publicly presented audiovisual composition. The film consequently connects the earlier communicative function of these recordings with their later role in an artistic investigation of memory and distance.

Malek (2019) examines how family photographs and home movies can acquire new meanings through their remediation within Iranian diasporic artistic practices. Although her discussion specifically addresses postmemorial artistic production, it provides a relevant point of comparison for understanding the changing contexts in which familial images circulate. In A Forbidden Distance, recordings associated with Canada and Iran are brought into relation with contemporary artistic encounters without being organised as a completed journey from one place to another. Their recomposition makes familial connections across separation perceptible, while also introducing questions about documentary authority. Formal analysis cannot establish the intentions of those who originally recorded or received the videos, nor can their appearance in the film provide transparent access to the experiences of every family member represented.

The distinction between experiences is equally important to the project’s treatment of collaboration. Migration, familial separation, artistic exchange, and cultural belonging intersect within the work, but they are not equivalent conditions. The geographical distance separating relatives and the differences between collaborating artists may enter the same audiovisual composition without acquiring identical historical or political meanings. This distinction prevents fragmentation from being treated as a direct visual analogue of displacement.

The organisation of language introduces another form of separation, raising questions about narrative authority and the mediation of testimony. Subtitles precede the identification of their speakers, delaying the association between statements and individual bodies. By separating written testimony from an immediately recognisable speaking subject, the film temporarily withholds information that would ordinarily help situate a statement within a particular biographical perspective. This does not erase the specificity of individual accounts or establish a unified collective voice. Rather, it draws attention to the distinction between the authority of participants to speak about their experiences and the editorial authority through which their statements are selected, positioned, and made available to the viewer. The delayed attribution of testimony thus becomes more than a formal discontinuity: it foregrounds the role of audiovisual organisation in shaping how individual perspectives enter the documentary narrative.

At approximately nine minutes, the written reflection “I am starting to understand that this is also about me, and my fascination with the life of others...” appears over images of people, accompanied by music rather than a corresponding spoken voice. These images subsequently give way to natural landscapes, including flowing water partially concealed by mist. Almost a minute passes before the thought concludes: “Just as if I had all the time in the world.” The interval interrupts the expectation of immediate verbal completion, while the transition from human figures to landscape establishes a changing visual context for the suspended reflection. Rather than directly illustrating the statement, the sequence articulates relationships between written language, image, music, and duration. Within a work concerned with distance, this organisation offers a formal means of approaching separation without equating audiovisual discontinuity with the historical experience of displacement.

Unlike conventional subtitles that transcribe synchronised speech, the written reflection functions as an autonomous textual element within the audiovisual composition. Its presentation without a corresponding audible voice leaves the speaking subject unidentified within the sequence, while its placement and duration foreground the editorial mediation of the statement. Narrative authority is therefore articulated not only through what is expressed but also through the audiovisual decisions governing its presentation and attribution.

A later reflection, at approximately 12′10″, introduces another relationship between time and collective experience: “It is in time that sound is framed. When a group of people hear a sound they are in sync... it becomes meaningful once it resonates and creates synchronicity.” The film subsequently states: “Performances are moments where you move in and out of sync.” These statements frame synchronisation as a temporary relationship produced through listening and performance, rather than a permanent condition of collective agreement. They provide a conceptual point of reference for considering how different artistic contributions may enter into relation while maintaining distinct temporalities.

This concern also informs the project’s live configurations. During live presentations, Saint Abdullah and Eomac perform the music while Salvadori composes the visual material in real time. The alignment between sound and image may therefore change through simultaneous artistic activity. The single-channel version examined in this study, however, cannot establish the specific interactions occurring during those presentations. Synchronisation and asynchrony can be analysed in the recorded work through sound-image relationships, editing, subtitles, and duration, while their operation in live performance depends on additional conditions of artistic action and presentation. Without direct observation, neither the precise dynamics of those performances nor their audience reception can be inferred from the film.

The relationship between these formats is relevant to the post-digital framework developed earlier. Archival family recordings, contemporary documentary footage, electronic music, audiovisual editing, and live visual composition coexist within a project that assigns different functions to recorded and performed images. In Cramer’s (2015) terms, the significance of these relationships lies in the cultural and artistic uses of media rather than in a progression from older to newer technologies. The family videos, for example, move from interpersonal communication to documentary material and artistic presentation. This transformation can be examined without attributing specific technical procedures to the work that the available evidence does not establish.

A Forbidden Distance therefore introduces a necessary qualification to the concept of sensorial documentation. Audiovisual fragmentation does not reproduce the lived experience of migration, and the coexistence of different materials cannot by itself account for the political and historical conditions of displacement. Its documentary significance emerges from identifiable relationships between those conditions and the film’s formal organisation: the circulation and recomposition of familial recordings, the delayed attribution of testimony, the juxtaposition of archival and contemporary images, and the intervals between statements. Through these procedures, the work articulates aspects of memory, distance, and artistic collaboration while preserving the distinction between the experiences represented and their audiovisual construction.

Compared with Messengers, which foregrounds artistic encounters organised as part of the filming process, and All We Got Is Us in the Moment, which examines an existing friendship, A Forbidden Distance approaches collaboration through relationships between distinct histories and experiences of separation. Its contribution to the comparative analysis lies in demonstrating how sensorial documentation may articulate connections across geographical and interpersonal distance without suggesting that artistic collaboration resolves the differences it brings into relation.

5. Conclusions

This article examined how Rebecca Salvadori’s moving-image practice negotiates the boundaries between video art, documentary, and performance through audiovisual fragmentation. The comparative analysis of five works demonstrates that fragmentation does not operate as a uniform aesthetic signature. Its documentary and relational functions vary according to the situations recorded, the circumstances of production, and the relationships established between images, sounds, gestures, and temporalities. Across the corpus, comparable formal procedures contribute to different forms of documentary construction: disclosing the filmmaking process, relating individual testimony to collective environments, reorganising personal archives, articulating artistic encounters, and connecting experiences of friendship and displacement.

These findings support sensorial documentation as a situated analytical concept for examining the relationship between documentary reference, audiovisual transformation, and the articulation of experience. The concept contributes to existing discussions of haptic visuality, embodied spectatorship, and performative documentary by directing attention to how recorded materials are formally reorganised to construct documentary meaning. It does not replace these approaches, nor does it designate a new documentary genre. Rather, it provides a framework for examining their intersections while distinguishing the formal properties of audiovisual works from the experiential possibilities they suggest and from the actual responses of spectators.

The post-digital framework clarifies another dimension of Salvadori’s practice. Understood through Cramer (2015) as a critical perspective on the coexistence and artistic uses of different technologies, post-digitality allows the analysis to consider the material and operational relationships between recording, editing, archiving, and presentation. Salvadori’s documented technical experimentation and the circulation of audiovisual materials across documentary and performative contexts demonstrate the relevance of this perspective. Yet neither fragmentation nor sensorial documentation follows automatically from the use of digital technologies. Their significance depends on the particular artistic decisions and production circumstances identified in the works.

The analysis also reveals tensions that complicate affirmative accounts of sensory experience and artistic collaboration. The participation of musicians, performers, and filmed subjects does not necessarily entail shared editorial authority, while the recomposition of documentary materials may establish new relationships at the cost of separating them from aspects of their original contexts. These questions are especially important in works involving personal archives, individual testimony, and experiences of displacement. A sensorial approach to documentary representation must therefore remain attentive to the differences between recorded experiences, their audiovisual construction, and the interpretations they make possible.

The study’s conclusions are limited by its qualitative research design and purposively selected corpus. The analysis was conducted through repeated viewings of recorded works, supported by published documentation and materials provided by the artist. It does not constitute an exhaustive study of Salvadori’s production or an empirical investigation of audience reception. Consequently, references to embodied perception and sensory engagement concern possibilities suggested by audiovisual form, not demonstrated spectator responses. The findings also cannot be directly extended to the spatial, acoustic, and participatory conditions of live presentations. Further research involving observation of performances, interviews with collaborators, and audience studies could investigate these dimensions and assess the applicability of sensorial documentation beyond this case study.

Salvadori’s work contributes to contemporary discussions of performative imaging by demonstrating how moving images can retain documentary relationships with particular people, places, and encounters while reorganising the ways those relationships become perceptible. The article’s contribution is to show that fragmentation acquires documentary significance not through discontinuity alone, but through the specific connections it establishes between recorded material, artistic processes, and the experiences or ideas articulated by audiovisual form. Within post-digital moving-image practices, these connections offer a means of understanding documentary representation as a situated process of audiovisual and relational construction.