Battle Royale di Federica Sasso at Mucho Mas!

In Federica Sasso’s visual research, the body is a projection surface, an interface, an identity in constant transformation.

Overview

For years, the artist has been investigating the relationship between adolescence, digital culture, and new media, developing a multidisciplinary language that encompasses photography, video, virtual reality, and immersive environments.

Her practice creates a universe where we can navigate the thin line between reality and fiction, real and virtual – an ambiguous territory where identity, desire, and representation ultimately overlap. These are works in which fragility and image construction, intimacy and spectacularization coexist.

Battle Royale fits into this research as a moment of reflection on the relationship between individuality and technology, self-representation and digital avatars, virtual worlds and physical space. Digital universes are not simply escape routes, but interactive artifacts that allow us to access distinct forms of experience – emotional and psychological spaces where alternative modes of existence are tested, ultimately not so distant from the one we live in.

Avatars act as fun, flamboyant extensions – identity devices suspended between vulnerability and aspiration. The large-format photographs are performative self-portraits that visualize individualities within real space, conveying both the physicality and spontaneity of the poses alongside the body language of the younger generations. Present yet absent, observed yet unreachable, they seem to inhabit a permanent threshold, constantly oscillating between connection and isolation.

Sasso also staging an immersive experience. Drawing on the visual nostalgia of the internet and "-core" online communities – including vaporwave, weirdcore, ASMR, liminal spaces, and reality shifting – the artist reveals their construction and generation process, as if everything could be made visible and accessible. The experience evokes a sense of encirclement, suffocating pressure, and bullying, presenting cognitive embodiment as a dramatic performance set within liminal, confused, and timeless spaces, where the boundary between physical presence and virtual identity grows increasingly unstable.

Much like in online worlds, everything in Sasso’s work appears simultaneously close and unreachable, intimate and artificial – an emotional present in which the individual and the body continue to swing between the need to be seen and the urge to disappear.

Curatorial text by Emanuele Amighetti.

About The Artist

Federica Sasso (b. 1992, Vicenza) is a visual artist and researcher based in Milan. Her practice investigates the perception of the body, the interaction between the virtual and the physical, and the impact of technology on contemporary life, exploring the boundaries and cross-pollination among photography, video, virtual reality, and new technologies.

She completed a two-year residency at FABRICA, the Benetton Group’s communication research center. Her work has been showcased in festivals and galleries such as Ars Electronica (AT), Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles (FR), Thessaloniki Photography Biennial (GR), Landskrona Photo Festival (SE), Casa degli Artisti (IT), and Fotografia Europea (IT).

In 2025, together with sound designer Luca Pagan, she co-founded 4E studio, an interdisciplinary practice exploring the relationship between the human body and technology. Their work investigates the creation of new senses and perceptions, redefining experience design through the innovative application of emerging technologies. Sasso and Pagan collaborate with research laboratories, engineers, and academic institutions, including the Italian Institute of Technology (Rehab Technologies Department), the University of Genoa (Cognitive Robotics Department), the University of Bologna (Department of Computer Science and Engineering), and the University of Milan (Department of Philosophy).