Live performances, immersive installations and virtual reality: the students of the Master’s degree in Multimedia Arts and Design bring RUFA creativity to the heart of Romaeuropa Festival 2025, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.”
Romaeuropa Festival 2025, one of the most important international events dedicated to contemporary art, dance, performance, theatre, music and cinema, once again opens its doors this year to digital experimentation. Among the protagonists will be RUFA students from the Master’s degree in Multimedia Arts and Design, who are participating as members of two collectives born within the very framework of the RUFA Master’s programme, coordinated by curator and art historian Caterina Tomeo, with projects that blend technology, body, memory and sound in a unique sensory dialogue.
Inlet Collective – Three LIVE Performances
Inlet is an interdisciplinary collective of multimedia artists based in Rome, born from the shared need to critically explore the relationship between technology, body and society. Composed of Rachele Cominella, Angela D’Onghia, Cor Langerak, Lorenzo Tomassucci, Simona Vacca and Marta Zorzan, the group brings together diverse backgrounds ranging from visual arts to performance, multimedia design and theoretical research.
The three performances – coordinated by multimedia artist and RUFA lecturer Filippo Gualazzi – will be presented as part of the event curated by Caterina Tomeo for Soundtrack 2025 by Raster Media, which this year hosts five of the twenty winners of the international call.
Angela D’Onghia and Simona Vacca
Based on the work and research of Léa Paintandre, the audiovisual performance explores the concept of the body as a place of production, reception and transformation of sound. Following the perspective of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, the body is not conceived as a simple physical object, but as a living medium between the self and the world, a passageway where sensory experiences take shape.
The visual dimension unfolds on two complementary levels: on one hand, the decomposition, recomposition and metamorphosis of bodies—human and non-human—which become surfaces and sound membranes; on the other, the emanation of the sounds themselves, which spread and transform into perceptions for the listener. In this process, the body is not only represented but traversed: like the sea, which is both a body in itself and an environment, it becomes a space of resonance and a perceptual threshold.
The work investigates transitional zones to evoke a sensitivity that escapes figuration and instead takes root in the sensory, in direct dialogue with sound.
An experience in which bodies become medium and threshold: producers and emitters, but also receivers and transformers. Visuals by Angela D’onghia and Simona Vacca.
Marta Zorzan and Lorenzo Tomassucci – «Étrange»
Étrange, dedicated to the work of Ireen Amnes & Merlin Ettore, guides the viewer through a mental landscape similar to a dream or nightmare, vibrating with light and sound and where liquid geometries and distorted bodies are in constant transition between the real and the abstract. It is a sensory journey on the edge between reality and imagination, exploring themes such as human perception and the relativity of time.
The inspiration for the creation of these visuals came from an impassioned study of twentieth-century artists such as Salvador Dalí, Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Fischinger, reinterpreted through a contemporary aesthetic. References are also made to Max Cooper, an artist very different in the media he uses, but very similar in his dreamlike, eccentric, colorful and never static expressiveness.
The work, consequently, is to be experienced as a stream of consciousness that leads to altered emotions, between a known self and an unknown self, positioned on the liminal threshold between concrete and abstract and teeming with figures and colors.
Rachele Cominella and Cor Langerak
The performance is an audiovisual investigation into the relationship between the artificial and the natural, inspired by Amit Damig’s research on sound deformation, hybrid voices and dynamic systems. Repetition, Motion Amplification, feedback and displacement become tools to reveal matter in continuous vibration, where machine, nature and architecture meet and contaminate each other.
Metallic gears and mechanical devices dialogue with water, air, fire, vegetation, but also with anamorphic forms and artificial architectures built by humans. These worlds, observed in their amplified micro-movements, show the same logic of pulsations, oscillations and instability. The breath of the wind, the sparkle of fire, the ripples of water and the vibrations of urban structures resonate with sound deformations and visual displacements, creating a landscape where the living and the constructed merge.
Repetition is not just mechanical, but a vital principle that crosses all matter. The work generates a unified audiovisual language, where machine, nature and architecture merge into a hybrid, unstable and generative organism.
Pascolo Abusivo: «REFrame Pelanda in VR» – the festival’s history in virtual reality
Pascolo Abusivo is a transdisciplinary and multimedia artistic collective founded in 2024, composed of five emerging artists from the Roman and Italian scene. The collective focuses on exploring the contemporary human experience through a mix of critical thinking, collective activism and experimentation.
Pascolo Abusivo investigates the expansion of perception, using different media and cutting-edge technologies, exploring the interaction between habitats, social practices and tools of contemporary digital culture.
Going beyond the boundaries of immersive experiences, light and sound performances and VJing, Pascolo Abusivo adopts an approach based on deep research and experimentation.
The collective is committed to digging beneath the surface of concepts, offering explorations that challenge conventional perspectives, with the mission of creating artistic projects that inspire the audience to broaden their understanding of reality and reflect on their role as both actors and observers of the real.
Based in Rome and active in Italy, Pascolo Abusivo embodies the minds and bodies of Silvia Baldo, Elisa Catalano, Annarita Debellis, Giuseppe Di Capua and Raffaele Esposito.
On the occasion of REF 2025, Pascolo Abusivo presents «REFrame Pelanda in VR», an immersive experience that takes the audience on a journey through the decades of Romaeuropa Festival. Through a VR headset, the viewer traverses three-dimensional environments dedicated to the festival’s most iconic moments: each space is an interactive landscape, populated by objects and posters that reactivate the visual and sound memory of forty years of history.
The act of crossing, transformed into a playful gesture, becomes a metaphor for the festival’s constant renewal. The journey culminates in a final environment that gathers works created over time by various RUFA courses, offering a new and participatory perspective on the festival’s past and future.
The work was created under the coordination and supervision of designer and RUFA lecturer Lorenzo Raffi.
Watch the photos from the event
With these works, RUFA students demonstrate how multimedia art can be at once critical reflection, technological experimentation and emotional engagement. Romaeuropa Festival thus becomes not only a stage, but also a living laboratory where new generations of artists redefine the boundaries of perception.
Discover the full Romaeuropa Festival 2025 program
Learn more about Raster Prize 2025
Practical Information
Inlet Collective Live Performance:
Tuesday, September 23, 8:00 PM–12:00 AM | La Pelanda, Mattatoio – Piazza Orazio Giustiniani, 4, Rome
(The live performances by Inlet Collective are presented as part of Soundtrack 2025 by Raster Media.)
“Pascolo Abusivo” Exhibition:
September 23–27 | La Pelanda, Mattatoio – Piazza Orazio Giustiniani, 4, Rome