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 Emanuele Amighetti, Chiara Bardelli Nonino, Claudio Bellini, Carola Nava, Luca Pagan and Leilei Wu

INDEX

Pupille 00, 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

Mom&Dad, 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

I’m just a girl, still from video 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

Fireworks, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea

Pupille 03, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea

Meriem, from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea

Sunset, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea

Pupille 04, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea

Taylor, still from video from the series Intangibile, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Fotografia Europea