There are festivals where you dance, and there are festivals where the notion of reality starts getting a little blurry. Videocittà sits firmly in the latter.
By design, the festival has gained a reputation for contributing to the regeneration of unused urban spaces in Rome over the past few years, giving these random locations not only a second purpose but also an extended reason to be inhabited beyond their initial use. Originally launched by founder Francesco Rutelli in 2018, Videocittà officially returns from July 10th to 12th to welcome the leading names in digital culture, teaming up with the energy company Eni to bring the unique Gazometro space to its full potential.
This time around, the entire experience is shaped around a concept they are calling Watercult. The idea is to take water as a resource, a landscape, and a symbol of how fragile our environment is right now, and give it a physical presence across the whole site. By leveraging the power of digital art, technological innovation, musical prowess, and an uninhibited imagination, the festival looks at how all the those elements can connect with nature in the most harmonious way possible.
Although you can expect the presence of many artists across different realms of digital awareness, we’ve put together a few standouts who we think you should catch at the site, in no particular order.
Apparat (DJ Set + Music for “In Lympha”)
Apparat’s career has quietly been navigating the intersections of human emotion and digital encounters. Also known as the “rat” in Moderat, for Videocittà, his presence is twofold and flying solo. Alongside a nuanced DJ set on the Main Stage that leans into his melancholic textures, Sascha Ring provides the exclusive soundscape for the immersive installation “In Lympha” inside Opificio 41. Reinterpreting his iconic track “Black Water” for its fifteenth anniversary, his sound steadily becomes a living architectural element designed to alter the physical weight of the space it inhabits.
Cao Yuxi (Immersive Installation)
Known for balancing immense spatial scale with a meticulous attention to micro-details, Cao Yuxi treats screens like an unlimited canvas. By housing his massive installation, “Nature’s Computility,” inside Opificio 60 Nord (an empty industrial warehouse space that will be unlocked for the public for the first time) the festival trusts his ability to turn complex particle physics and data code into a completely immersive landscape. His work is not meant to be a mere tech spectacle; rather, it is an intuitive observation of how digital art can quietly redefine the spatial reality of those present.
Giuseppe La Spada, Francesca Heart & Amanda Lana (Immersive Installation & Live Performance)
This collaboration is essentially a meditation on fluidity, bridging organic memory with the metallic essence of the site. Giuseppe La Spada, alongside Francesca Heart and Amanda Lana, presents “Water: Always the same, always different,” a project that pulls double duty as an ambient installation and a live performance. Through minimal visuals, responsive soundscapes and movement, the piece captures the cyclical nature of water, showing it as something constant, yet entirely renewed against the rigid iron grid of the Gazometro.
Mace (DJ Set AV)
One of Italy’s most prominent producers, Mace moves past his initial hip-hop roots to explore a hybrid blend of electronic club culture, psych-ambient, and jazz. For this set, developed alongside Sugo Design, his performance aligns with the festival’s overarching water theme. Instead of the standard strobe lighting, the stage will be framed by organic fluid simulations and liquid digital projections that morph in real-time, making the live set incredibly intuitive.
Sara Persico & Mika Oki (AV Music)
The pairing of Naples-born sound artist Sara Persico and Brussels-based visual artist Mika Oki is really an exercise in atmosphere. Persico’s abstract vocals and industrial textures ground the sound, while Oki uses light, smoke, and shadow to change how the physical space feels around you. Together, they’ll create a minimalist, late-night environment that explores the boundaries between what you hear and what you can actually see inside the industrial site.
