RUFA and Saint Louis College of Music present “Confluences” – three evenings of audiovisual art as part of Videocittà Watercult 2026.
RUFA and Saint Louis College of Music join forces for five multimedia performances, from 10 to 12 July 2026, in the evocative urban industrial archaeology setting of Rome’s Gazometro.
CONFLUENCES is an audiovisual project bringing five live performances to the stage of the Gazometro as part of Videocittà Watercult 2026, each built around a continuous dialogue between sound and image. From 10 to 12 July, over three evenings featuring two performances each, five groups of RUFA visual artists from the Multimedia Design and Creative AI and Cinema programmes will meet the ensembles of students from Saint Louis’ Jazz and Pop academic programmes in a creative exchange conceived as a recursive ecosystem: video influences sound, sound influences video, with neither taking the lead.
The common thread connecting all the works is water, explored from a wide range of perspectives: from the Venetian Lagoon to the River Tiber, from the tear as an emotional trace to the spring as a symbol of origin. Each performance is born from the encounter between the visual sensitivity of RUFA artists and the sonic improvisation of Saint Louis musicians, featuring students of electronic music, vocals, piano, guitar and bass. The dialogue between these two artistic languages takes shape within a shared stage setting, designed to reveal in real time the relationship between what is seen and what is heard.
Light installations, immersive, interactive and virtual reality experiences, digital art, DJ sets and live audiovisual performances will animate the largest urban industrial archaeology site in Europe.
Discover the full programme ↓
Surface Tension
by Rachele Cominella
Friday 10 July – 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM
Opening the three-evening programme is Surface Tension, a two-act work by Rachele Cominella, created in collaboration with Gabriele Ceccarelli and Nicolò Rusca.
The work stems from a year-long research project conducted in the Venetian lagoon, developed by Cominella together with a group of friends and collaborators connected to the Opificio collective.
Surface Tension moves beyond the conventional image of Venice through live footage and physical projections onto the lagoon’s waters, where the city’s hidden mechanisms—its infrastructures and everyday flows—exist in a state of constant tension. Water becomes a living, moving element, merging with the life that passes through it until it becomes an integral part of it. Upon this surface, projections take shape: artificial patterns that refract and transform into a hypnotic flow, revealing the subtle web that connects the city’s inhabitants to their surroundings.
Engaging in dialogue with the visuals are two ensembles of Saint Louis musicians: Bbleoh (Leonardo Monti) on electronics and Anna Pia Gallo on vocals for the first set; QT (Davide Cutillo) on electronics and Jacopo Tarchi on guitar for the second.
The performance unfolds in real time according to the core principle of Confluences: a continuous, reciprocal exchange between sound and image, with neither language taking precedence over the other.
Vacuo Accumularsi
by Lorenzo Fabbri and Michele Pomponio.
Saturday 11 July – 7:00 PM
A man stands at the top of a cliff. Below him, the sea. The act of diving, charged with its extreme intensity, stretches and repeats until it becomes almost unbearable. Then comes the slap of the water, bringing everything back to the surface. From that moment, the scene reverses: the LED wall becomes a tank in which the man remains trapped, unable to escape, like a magic trick gone wrong. Film projections and liquid images surround him, absorb him, and make him lose the need to surface for air, until, after postponing drowning for too long, he too must become a projection in order to continue existing.
The work’s sonic landscape is performed by an ensemble featuring Lorenzo Nicoletti on electronics, Giuseppe Forlenza on guitar and Martha Deribe on vocals.
Credits: concept by Lorenzo Fabbri and Michele Pomponio; artistic coordination by Raffaele Simongini; directed by Lorenzo Fabbri and Michele Pomponio; cinematography by Filippo Quarantini, Giandomenico Balta and Luca Soreca; starring Ruggero Francica Nava; editing by Lorenzo Fabbri; produced by Michele Pomponio.
Sorgente
by Marta Zorzan and Lorenzo Tomassucci
Saturday 11 July – 8:00 PM
We are born from water twice: as a species, through millions of years of evolution, and as individuals, immersed in it during the first months of life. Even before we had a name, water was already our original condition.
Sorgente does not treat water as a simple element, but as a primordial language made of movements, oscillations and cycles with no visible boundary between beginning and end. A language that flows through bodies, changes form without losing itself, and moves through the states of matter just as it moves through time. The project emerges from an attempt to listen once again to this ancient, cyclical language through evolving imagery and live sound, in a journey that moves from the intimate to the cosmological, from the drop to the source, from the body to the universe.
Marta Zorzan is a multimedia artist and designer whose research lies at the intersection of philosophy and the humanities, combining critical thinking with visual experimentation across different media.
Lorenzo Tomassucci is a designer and multimedia artist whose practice explores 3D animation, VFX and real-time interactive installation, investigating the relationship between body, space and technology.
Supporting the work live is an ensemble featuring Martin Lucas de Carvalho on electronics, Edoardo Paggi on guitar and Silvia Roberto on vocals.
suspended floating point operations
by Cor Langerak.
Sunday 12 July – 7:00 PM
The title provides the conceptual key to the work: floating point is the numerical format underpinning every digital simulation—the way a computer records a continuous quantity such as the flow of water.
Read differently, it is also the point left floating in the void—the unit to which the river is ultimately reduced—and it carries with it its own margin of error: the small yet permanent loss of precision that every discrete measurement of something continuous inevitably entails. The work originates from slow footage of the surface of the River Tiber, which remains intact until the current begins to corrupt it: where the water flows faster, the image breaks apart and the pixels are dragged along by the current. In the final sequence, the image collapses into its smallest unit, and the water reappears as a drifting cloud of three-dimensional points—a simulation generated from the original footage before breaking free from it and continuing to flow autonomously. As Langerak writes, the river is no longer filmed: it is calculated.
Tear Model
by Angela D’Onghia and Simona Vacca.
Sunday 12 July – 8:00 PM
Tear Model explores the possibility of artificial sadness through the computational simulation of emotions. Its starting point is water in its most intimate form: the tear. Through an artificial intelligence model capable of predicting human neural responses to audiovisual stimuli, the performance translates pain into data, images and sound, questioning the boundary between emotional experience and algorithmic processing. If artificial emotions are clearly constructed, the artists ask, how can we be certain that human emotions are entirely authentic and not, at least in part, learned? The tear thus becomes the meeting point between body and algorithm, where the boundary between lived and simulated emotion grows increasingly blurred.
Angela D’Onghia (Martina Franca, 2001) and Simona Vacca (Cagliari, 2001) are a Rome-based multimedia artist duo. Their practice spans audiovisual performance, installation and hybrid artistic territories, creating experimental scenarios in which body and technology become tools for interpreting the present.
The work’s sonic dimension is performed by an ensemble featuring Iolanda Isabella on electronics, Silvia Olivier on piano and Angelica Bianchi on vocals.
This double performance concludes the journey of Confluences: three evenings, six works, and one underlying question: how much of human experience—from water to emotion—can still be said to exist independently of technology?
Useful Information
Videocittà Watercult 2026
Via del Commercio 9–11 – Rome (Metro Line B, Garbatella)
Doors and ticket office open to the public from 7:00 PM
Admission: €20 day ticket; €50 three-day pass; free admission for children under 12
For more information, visit the official Videocittà website.