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

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.