For nearly ten years, Federica Sasso has been conducting a complex research project on Gen Z, exploring a wide range of topics in contemporary life including the intersection between body and technology, the boundary between the real and the virtual, gaming, social media, and youth subcultures on the internet.
With Intangibile, a project specially commissioned for Fotografia Europea 2025, the artist grapples with a theme that usually receives scant visual attention: that of young caregivers, people who dedicate themselves to taking care of family members.

The title emphasises the meaning of the theme: representing the intangibility of an act of devotion, rarely recognised by society in its identity-bound specificity, and its virtual counterbalance in the algorithmic flow. The project’s approach shifts back and forth between daily routine and escapism, bringing together a series of portraits with their TikTok feeds. And it touches on themes like surveillance, entertainment, and the digital targeting of the individual.

Through the use of positional sensors and an algorithm created ad hoc for the exhibition, in collaboration with engineers from the Italian Institute of Technology, the closer spectators come to the subjects’ blown-up images, the blurrier those images become, in an overt reference to social invisibility.

Sasso challenges the possibilities of a serial approach to photography: the portraits oscillate between echoes of passport- type photos and the nature of constructed images. Continually playing on the contrasts between digitalised image, profiling and de-personification, the subjects become archetypes of care and sacrifice.

Though a method that eschews direct storytelling, preferring to let the faces and social media help imagine intriguingly complex personal stories, Sasso ensures that it’s the spectator who chooses between engagement and aloofness, in the difficult task of giving visibility to the invisible.

TEAM
Art Direction and Graphic Design: Maria Chiara Moro
Programming: Michele Canepa and Samuele De Giuseppe
Light Technician: Luca Baldini
Hair: Bruno Spavone
Make-up: Filippo Giuseppe Ferrari
Commissioned by Luce Lebart and Fotografia Europea 2025
Thanks to Nicolò Hebel, Emanuele Amighetti, Claudio Bellini, Luca Pagan, Carola Nava.

INDEX
Pupille 00, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.
I want to be, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.
Nicola, from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.
Pupille 01, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.
Il crollo del tempo, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.
Mom&Dad, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.
I’m just a girl, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.
Lisya Rita, from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.
Pupille 02, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.
Workout, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.
Marra, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.
La legge di Murphy, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea.