No more hiding: Rebecca Salvadori talks visual mapping of the music scenes

What led you as a filmmaker to start working closely with an experimental music scene?

I got my first camera when I was 18 and started filming everything around me. I grew up in the countryside in Tuscany, so I was basically filming my family and nature. Then, I moved to Venice to study visual arts at the IUAV University and continued experimenting with film, expanding my archive of moments to include portraits of friends. In 2007, I moved to Berlin, where I was involved in multidisciplinary art environments until 2010.

During those years, I was able to verify the strong connection between art, music, and filmmaking. I worked at .HBC, a now-closed Berlin club, documenting all the parties, exhibitions, and events there. There was something about music that didn’t need language—something very physical about the musical experience, the immediacy of it. Somehow, there was a space for me to understand myself better. Basically, I was very interested in existing in specific environments and understanding how I feel in them, and the environments where I felt comfortable were those built around music. When I moved to London, I started curating experimental music nights and filming musicians and, I’ve basically never stopped.

The Rave Trilogy (2020), as well as your other works, benefit greatly from your acknowledged personal involvement with each of the scenes, clubs, or collectives, which can be seen and felt intensely. When you shoot the film, is the involvement something you try to separate yourself from, or do you not think about it at all?

When I first began exploring how to exist within different environments, I could feel this external pressure—to be objective, to distance myself from the personal. For me…  it’s about creating all these simultaneous threads of meaning and moments that are in conversation with myself, in conversation with an idea of the world, in conversation with an idea of environment. I don’t have any straight answers, and I’m not trying to. What I’m interested in is opening multiple threads of interpretation, creating layers of complexity, and quietly engaging different kinds of audiences—each bringing their own visual references and perspectives to the work. I like building that complexity from a place that starts with how I feel.

Still, most of the audience won’t experience the exact feeling of a club or concert as you did in person while watching the footage. Do you keep this in mind while shooting your films, or do you somehow try to enclose and recreate your specific experience?

I would say that I have a sense of myself and a sense of the viewer. But it’s not so straightforward; it’s more like cooking: I have a sense of what might happen if I add one ingredient or another, but I try not to overthink it. The films are quite sensorial, and often I let them guide me, responding to what they seem to need in each moment.

When you’re clubbing, there’s a moment when you get a little lost, lose track of your friends, and find yourself alone under the speakers. You start reflecting: Why am I here? What am I still doing here? Then, you run into a friend; they tell you something completely unrelated, and suddenly your state of mind shifts entirely. I’m fascinated by this interplay between personal and collective experience—how these encounters can resonate on multiple levels—and I love exploring it through open, layered narratives in my work.

But I also let the films speak to me. Messengers is a very complex project, and it’s teaching me a lot about how dysfunctional my relationship with structure can be. The conversation around structure is a curious one…

Messengers is a personal, intimate, yet still kind of communal experience, as the audience plays a major role. Where did the idea for Messengers originate?

I created a large archive of conversations exploring music composition, existential questions in relation to music and art, and their connection to the urban context. My intention was to create an episodic film, where each episode explores different ways of existing within music—not organized by genre, but by the kinds of conversations and rituals that surround it.

The Sun Has No Shadow (2022) was intended as the first chapter, and Messengers as the second. While The Sun Has No Shadow explored the rituals surrounding clubbing, Messengers examines the fleeting nature of participation—where we and our experiments exist in that precise moment—and how those moments are intertwined with the biographies of the musicians involved. For me, these films—these chapters—are like love letters to the people who have shared their knowledge, their experiences, and everything that has shaped them with me.

What happened is that The Sun Has No Shadow became quite autonomous, beginning to exist alongside TRESOR TAPES (2022) in a different conversation. Meanwhile, Messengers became much more meta, deeply embedded in the idea of existing as a live performance.

In Messengers, there was a particular moment when someone said, “It’s really important to have moments of boredom not to lose yourself”. This resonated with me, as I recently read a touching personal essay about noise and sonic overstimulation. How do you reflect on your moments of boredom?

I feel very compressed, intensely aware of how quickly my thoughts translate into the film. As soon as I have a thought, it becomes part of the work. Everything becomes the film immediately. I know I need boredom, quiet, and time for things to settle—but it’s almost as if I can’t allow it. There’s a constant tension, a frustration from overstimulation, yet for the way I work, everything I feel or think inevitably becomes part of the film.

As Messengers is a still-evolving film, do you somehow feel restrained by the time-capsulation tendency of film media in general?

No—for me, films are a bit like writing, and in that, I feel very free. The greatest constraint is my own mind. It’s the form itself that interrogates, trying to understand what it is.

You often bring your projects to life via commissions. Can you enlighten us on how the commissioned project culture works, perhaps what the pros and cons are?

What’s really interesting about it is that the people who connect with your work come to you with their own ideas and desires. I really like that conversation about expectations, limitations, how to handle it… Every commission is different, and you can be very clear about what you can offer and what you can’t. You might see the limits of the person making the request, and at the same time, you confront your own. It becomes a true conversation. For me, a commission is exactly that: a dialogue between two people.

This year’s Lunchmeat Festival visitors had the chance to see you present your latest project, A Forbidden Distance, in collaboration with Saint Abdullah and Eomac. The project maps the influence of family and cultural heritage, particularly that of the former. The piece will also have its Slovak premiere at Festival Next on November 28. How did this collab come to life?

The collaboration came through Times, The Independent Movement for Electronic Scenes. They have an interesting format: they identify musicians and artists who might work well together and commission new work/performances, which then tour across different festivals. It’s essentially a co-commission between Times and a group of partner festivals. We were approached by Times and Berlin ATONAL, with whom I had collaborated on a few occasions. I was transparent about my artistic process—I usually work with friends or people I know very well. So, at first, I felt a bit disoriented by the idea of being paired with someone unfamiliar. But I couldn’t have been luckier: with Saint Abdullah and Eomac, we really clicked immediately. The process of making the work became a process of getting to know each other. Mohammed and Ian were open about how they felt about life and themselves, showing incredible vulnerability throughout the process, which made the collaboration all the richer.

I’ve learned a lot from this collab, and I am very much looking forward to touring and understanding the work more while sharing it with broader audiences. We had meetings and talked. Mohammed had this very personal footage—his mom wanted to be a war journalist, and when they were nine, they migrated from Iran to Canada. There was this thing where the migrant families would share a camera and send the footage back to Iran to show their life in the West, what was happening, and she accumulated all this incredible footage. Mohammed was telling me all the stories behind it and getting very emotional. While I was editing all this material, I thought about my biography and Ian’s biography. This sort of intertwined biographies in parallel, and this desire to understand each other in the collaborative process, made this work very special for us. I also feel that a lot of people in the audience felt connected to it.

A Forbidden Distance also touches on the SWANA/Western identity clash. Do you approach your work as political?

I often think of Jonas Mekas, who said that there is nothing more incredible than a person unwrapping a present someone has given them—highlighting the beauty of the expectation of being known and seen. That’s the kind of sensitivity I feel very close to. But that doesn’t mean the work is unaware of its effects. Creating work that opens space for possibility is, hopefully, not simply a self-involved extension of romanticized biographies or personal narratives. I was very fortunate that, with Mohammed and Ian, the shared desire was to make work that opens a conversation.

I feel it’s hearable and visible, and opening spaces for some kind of clash of structures feels, to me, pretty radical.

Yes, it’s about opening a space. And within that space, everyone can exist and explore how they feel. For me, that’s also what I hope for myself: to share that space with another, to truly find each other. 

In The Sun Has No Shadow, someone is asking you if you are hiding behind a camera. I was wondering, years later, if you have an answer for this one—maybe if you are sometimes actually glad that you can hide behind it.

I feel very different now. It’s a bit like falling in and out of love. It’s not rational—sometimes you want to love someone, but your body tells you that you don’t anymore. I feel the same way about my relationship with being behind and in front of the camera. I used to hide behind it to exist in certain environments. But after The Sun Has No Shadow and through the process of working on Messengers, that changed. I’m not hiding anymore. Yet I still remember how comforting it felt to hide, and sometimes I do it intentionally. In a new environment, I might open the camera and feel reassured—knowing that my role as a person with a camera is enough, and I don’t have to be anything else.

Proofreading: Anna Ďurišíková

Pictures: 

[1] A Forbidden distance (r. Rebecca Salvadori)

[2, 4] Desert Rave (r.Rebecca Salvadori)

[3] Rebecca Salvadori (Henerico Rossi)

[5] Inside Fold (r.Rebecca Salvadori)

[6] The Sun Has No Shadow (r. Rebecca Salvadori, photo Matt Favero)