Sandra Zanetti creates live art confronting repressed urges and difficult truths, transforming survival residue into ritual through performance, sound, and visual language. 

Drawing from underground theatre, imagemaking, and dream logic, their work uses the body as a site of intimate reconstructions where boundaries between domination and submission, rationality and instinct, dream and reality converge. 

These performances bleed, seduce, and self-destruct, and refuse neat resolution. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the CICA Museum, Riposte London, and Æther Sofia. 

“In performance, they might see what you didn’t want them to see.”
                   -- Sandra Zanetti (2026)
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THE COW AND I
Exhibited at Kochi-Murziris Biennale, The Cow and I, is an act of mutual recognition and peace. The cow, culturally revered and commodified, becomes a mirror, and hopefully, a friend. An interaction that tenderly unsettles hierarchical structures, opening a space to witness a body without harm—raw, alive, unpossessed.

The piece situates itself within broader conversations on ethics, ecofeminism, cultural symbolism, and the relational self. A gesture of attentiveness in a world too often defined by consumption and estrangement.
2025 - 2026
BAR BELLA
Staged in my studio as a retired boxer’s speakeasy, accessible only when an “open” sign was flipped and I was in, and if you knew, you knew.

Located within my studio as part of a larger program, the work functioned as a social experiment. The bar became a deliberate act of presence, transforming the studio into a site of gathering where community, pleasure, and connection could persist despite the hostile conditions.
2025
IN SHAMBLES: RAW CUT
Set in an underground space beneath Cultural Center Krasno Selo for the closing of Sofia Art Week, the durational performance involved repeatedly punching the groin of a suspended cow carcass with bare knuckles, using the act as a metaphor for a fight we never asked for but must keep facing. Blurring the lines between discipline and devotion, care and violence, intimacy and domination, the work exposes systems of power, vulnerability, and erasure with raw repetition and asks what it means to try again. 

Zanetti spent four months healing from injuries sustained during the performance, a reminder that all things, no matter how brutal, must heal in time. 2025




MOTHER ELYSIA: RITUEL DE LA PETIT MORT
Performed at the Bulgarian Cultural Center in Paris as a response to the work of Jean-Claude and Christo, the Cult Figure Mother Elysia painstakingly prepared her face with layers of makeup, a ritual of readiness, of stepping toward ego death. A strange priest, Goche, enters, chanting “How can you hate life?”, bearing the infamous shroud, which he unwraps from himself and drapes around the cult figure, guiding her toward the light. He returns, presenting the shroud stamped with Elysia’s visage — a grotesque, dazzling exploration of devotion, spectacle, and desire. The ritual, reverential yet fabulously unhinged, cast Mother Elysia as a threshold‑walker, leaving the audience suspended on the edge of the How Can You Hate Life ritual‑cum-rave funeral, a space where unapologetically feminine energy, transcendence, camp, and ecstatic abandon collided. 2025
HER MESS
A collaborative performance by Sandra Zanetti and Joshua Philpott, Kneeling side by side, they chewed through a rope suspending a marble slab, which eventually fell and shattered Zanetti’s cherished Hermès Platinum Breakfast Cup—one of a pair she had found at a charity shop for £6. The piece responded to the cup’s earlier accidental breaking by Philpott: though unintentional, it left a mark. 

The work reflected on care, attention, and trust in everyday life, and on how repair and tenderness can emerge after rupture. How something can be lifted when shared attention restores what was broken.
2025
MIRACLE ON WHITGIFT STREET
A classic American Santa-style Meet & Greet in a dying Croydon mall with the great and powerful Mother Elysia, who has only fifteen minutes—and no one is allowed to waste them (she’s on tour). 

The work explores moments when her time is taken for granted: she commands attention, orchestrates labor, makes the audience clean up after her, and stages photographs that blur what actually happened. Many people played along, some had no idea what was going on, and the result is part critique, part spectacle, part Warholian wink—fifteen minutes of absurdity, chaos, and devotion.

2025
ONE SHOT
This work, screened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, inhabits cinema’s origins of shock and confrontation, tracing the impact that images have on the spaces they press into. 

The theater becomes a site where attention, expectation, and tension examine the unspoken, the unresolved, and the inescapable. Force applied from a body coded as passive, accommodating, or vulnerable, the captive audience becomes a mirror of spectatorship itself: bound, disciplined, to remain quiet, remain still….

2025
HIDE
Performed at Brutal. Project Space in Cape Town.

like idk what to say, yet about this one. I need more time. I did what any girl would do. I hid my splayed body under an illegal delapidating zebra hide and confused everyone with the fact that I was pretending not to go to my own opening, but I was in fact a living cartoon--clearly there, breathing up and down on the floor like...they were not comfortable. I ended the piece by crawling out of the exhibition on all fours under the zebra of course.
2025
PREDATOR/PREY
In this collaboration, Sandra Zanetti and Leah Rachel Hawker, both in character, assume the roles of model/photographer within an expanded meta-performance that is simultaneously reflective, confusing, threatening, sexy, grotesque, absurd, potent, and enduring.

Zanetti embodies the fluctuating locus of power between predator and prey, examining structural violence that shapes the body and its gestures, captured through Hawker’s lens. Tracing the theatricality of social, historical, and bodily expectations within the archetypes of the hunter and hunted, each defining and undoing the other. Moving beyond history, aware of the gaze that seeks to define it, whether political, cinematic, cartoonish, or otherwise. The result was exhibited at Brutal. in Cape Town.

2025

MOTHER ELYSIA: DAWN
Mother Elysia rises with the sun and holds blessings in Arda, Bulgaria. 2025


IT’S OK
Is it tho? A long-distance collaboration over the airwaves with Josh Philpott performed at the Watertower Art Fest in Bulgaria. 2025
MOTHER ELYSIA: IGNIS
Unfolding in the remote wilderness of Bulgaria, Ignis invites the ritual burning of a scarecrow bearing the image of Elysia, the Cult Figure. Trance-like gestures of ignition and endurance invite regeneration through release and destruction. 

Participants are called to release into the fire after a long journey through the Rhodope Mountains. This springtime ritual expands on all that consumes us, asking how we survive and transform under their weight.

Featured in the documentary WTAR. 2025
RELATION IN SPACE
Performed live at Chisenhale, this work is a collaboration between Sandra Zanetti and Joshua Philpott. Documented solely through audio, it re-enacts the first collaboration between Marina Abramović and Ulay. Entering the performance with curiosity and a spirit of play, the piece soon took on a life of its own, extending beyond the original performers’ parameters. While adhering to the physical structure of the original, we encountered unexpected moments of tenderness, care, and emotional connection. Like a painter reimagining a familiar scene, the work became deeply personal and uniquely ours.2025IT DOESN’T HAVE TO
A spontaneous ritual of repair between Sandra Zanetti and Josh Philpott. Following a subsequent period of no communication between the two, Zanetti reached out to Philpott to ask if he would be willing to meet in person to make a sound piece together, bound by one rule: that no words could be spoken throughout the session. Each had written a tone-setting statement on their journey to the recording space as a starting point.

Using an electric guitar, amplified violin, a harmonium, and effects pedals, energy and sound spontaneously came together to close the gap between each other as they created an organic, emergent connection beyond language. The result is a raw, shaky, and fragile piece offering trust, vulnerability,  and reconciliation.2025
NOX NEWS PRESS CONFERENCE: DON’T CALL IT A COME BACK
The paintings are hot off the press. Now to get her on the TV to promote them. The all-too-familiar arc of celebrity self-destruction—like Rocky in Rocky III, who, after fame softened his fists, became a hollow version of himself.  This press conference is the grotesque spectacle of unraveling—emotional decay repackaged as artistic reinvention. 


A fragmented, very public, orchestrated fallout because they think I’m crazy anyway.. 2025
SMASH HIT: PERFORMANCE PAINTING
Performance paintings created and exhibited at Eade Road Studios. When a boxer, once at the height of her fame, loses in the ring, she is forced to rebrand as a painter. 

Drawing on George Bush’s late-career attempt at watercolor, Tony Curtis’s dabbling in the fine arts to make a buck, mixed with Warhol’s choreography of public image blend to produce hilariously terrible Ab Ex paintings created by dipping fists into pallets and punching the heck out of raw canvas.

The paintings, born from the desperation to survive, now serve as currency—bought and sold in a world that thrives on the broken pieces of its icons, too damaged to be hidden but too valuable to ignore. It mirrors my real practice—where manipulation, desperation, and the need for survival are all disguised as reinvention, and identity fragments become just another commodity to be marketed.
2025
MOTHER ELYSIA: COVENANT 
A 7-day voluntary solitary confinement in Pietro Giorini’s studio at SET Woolwich, comprised of daily rituals, ending with a live liturgical gathering complete with a last supper comprising of cheeseburgers from the UK’s first McDonalds and wine. I explore the tension between renunciation and reclamation by stripping myself of the external world and its expectations, while simultaneously confronting the very rawness of what I’ve tried to escape within myself. How we are all, in some ways, trapped in systems that attempt to define us, but how we also have the power to break free from those systems—and how, even in our most broken and vulnerable states, we can still transform..2025
CONSTRUCTING PHOENOMENA
Intensive artist lab in Esoteric Performance with Ron Athey, hypnotist Michele Occelli Presented by Future Ritual at Battersea Arts Centre, London, resulting in a multi-genre collaborative performance happening.
2025
ANCORA!
A hyperstylized brain-rot poor image video re-enacting the scene in Rocky where Rocky repeatedly punches raw beef carcasses in a slaughterhouse. I low-key just added every possible TikTok effect to the original clip, shot in a London abattoir. It’s overdone, and you should send it back to the kitchen. It’s something you watch on repeat until drool starts falling out of your mouth because you aren’t sure if you even get what’s happening. I know I don’t. I had to do it, but why? That isn’t the important part. Are you not entertained? When is enough enough? Have I had enough? Do I have to continue? I started this, but how do I finish it? Why must we beat a thing to death even after it’s slaughtered?2025
GHOST LOGIC
Exhibited at CONDITIONS in London, a digital projector duct-taped to a Super-8 sputters and stutters, a monstrous hybrid body where analogue and digital resisting function and performing failure. Gestures and images arrive before narrative, and malfunction performs between control and truth. This is not cinema: it loops, melts, and collapses story, eroding expectation while memory and pop culture flicker like ghosts. Ghost Logic is a séance of presence, a space where time, media, and perfection unravel, leaving only sputters, glitches, and the strange beauty of what persists when control is relinquished, insisting that the audience feel rather than understand.
2024 - 2025

IS THAT A GUN IN YOUR POCKET?
I attend a Florida gun show. I learn to carry concealed. I speak with salesmen. I handle several firearms and disassociate a bit. The training is choreography: step right, sign here, smile big, shoot there. The audience is real and also in danger—but aren’t we all going down with this ship? The state, the myth of self-defense. Handshake, cheeseburger, brochure, bullet casing. Compliance, curiosity, fear, patriotism. All of this is very funny and also not funny at all. These people are organized. Very organized. Sort of a performance for the plot?2024

IN SHAMBLES: PLEASE, I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO FIGHT ANYMORE
Performed at the 2024 CSM MA Degree show. A confrontation with consumption, violence, and the politics of the body, In Shambles: Please I don't want to have to fight anymore stages the brutality of survival under systems that digest, objectify, and discard. Drawing on imagery of butchery, fast food, and boxing, the piece examines cycles of desire, destruction, and imposed struggle, where victory and loss collapse into exhaustion. The performance brought together a diverse cast—friends, lovers, strangers—whose interactions mapped intimacy, power, and conflict. Through improvisational, boxing-based activations, exposure, devotion, and relentless engagement, resilience emerges: broken, unbowed, and still standing.2024

SANDRA ZANETTI IN CONVERSATION WITH SANDRA ZANETTI
A sort of Eric Andre-style live TV interview with myself at Proposition Studios interspersed with a Buroughseaque video cut up of 9/11 footage.. I asked myself everything I’d be embarrassed to be asked, and answered hesitantly. The interviewer interrupted me, focused on was on what I was wearing, and belittled the work I was invited to speak about. At the time, I didn’t realize it was a direct parallel with the brutality of relationships around me. 2024

TUESDAY WITH WARHOL
A collaboration with Meej Douglas. Your chaotic fav is back. The opening of a cabaret-style fundraiser at Proposition Studios. This performance features Mr. Tuesday encountering none other than Andy Warhol at a bar, and they find out the ice cream man has more in common with the artist than one might think.  2024

ROCKY TRAINING VIDEO
A documentary of my 9-month transformation into a boxer. I drank eggs. I climbed the stairs. I fought people. Method acting at its finest. 2024

FIGHT NIGHTS
I obsessively trained as a boxer for a 9 month durrational performance. In this hypermasculine space, I was infantilized, sexualized, and barred from competition due to entrenched biases—paralleling the history of women’s boxing, which has often been relegated to sideshows rather than seen as a legitimate sport. 

At its core, the work is about the paradox of choosing to fight while being trapped within systems of oppression. It reflects both physical destruction and emotional resilience, resonating across professions, identities, and artistic practices.2024
FIGHT CLUB
I made a sign-up sheet on my old website, inviting anyone to put on my spare gloves and fight me in my studio. Just an experiment, and a fun way to see how far people would go, and some people came!

Looking back, I think it was less about the fight and more about a search for connection, for a spark of engagement, for someone to show up and just laugh a little about this absurd engagement to cheer me up a bit. After all, we don’t gotta fight. ;) 2024

SEX TOILET
A performance in which I created the persona of Danche Sélavy, a toilet attendant in a bathroom, using humor, camp aesthetics, and subversion to explore power, identity, labor, and societal structures, blending absurdity with defiance in a critique of classism, gender expectations, and institutional constraints. This piece took place as a permanet installation at the Central Saint Martins Archway Campus, as well as performed as a temporary piece at the 2024 CSM MA Degree show. 2024

SLEEPING ON THE INSTITUTION
A collective guerrilla performance of 25 artists organized by Wuda Lin, confronting hurdles within institutional hierarchies by occupying Tate Modern.

Participants lay down in nightwear within the Arts & Society section of the institution as visitors to the Tate work their way around the performers until we were kicked out.2024

THE PHLAMBARDS

She’s been gone 4 years now...

Hannah Absalom as Van Mon Wed
Meej Douglas as Alan Logue
Em Doodles as Lord Phlambard
Sandra Zanetti as Lady Phlambard
Bodie Stanley as Brian Jelly
Hollie Palmer as Frau Klappe

The Phlambards was performed at Central Saint Martins as well as selected for Riposte: Around the Table Rave at Electrowerkz in London curated by Jade Marroushi-Desmond. 2024

TO SEE WHAT I HAVE SEEN
The performance channels the death of Ophelia as a meditation on grief, loss, and the end of a version of myself. In a dark, suffocating project space, my body lies in a pool of black liquid seeping into my nose and mouth, dressed in a white Mexican dress, surrounded by greenery, planks, steel, caution tape, and fox pellets. A strobe flickers, illuminating twisted willow, daisy, poppy, and iris—symbols of madness, mourning, and mortality in English literature. Caught between grave and womb, senses deprived, heat rising violently. I endure meditations on emotional torture and humiliation. I feel onlookers witness all I don’t want them to know.2024

MR. TUESDAYS MELTDOWN: ICE CREAM BEGINS TO MELT BEFORE YOU MANAGE TO EVEN TAKE A BITE (FKA THE SHIT SHOW)
A sunburnt Texan businessman bursts into a sterile gallery with a sputtering ice cream machine. He juggles a checkbook, revealing mounting debt, while attempting to serve ice cream that emerges as a grotesque chocolate squirt. Audience reactions swing from laughter to disgust. Rolls of toilet paper printed with the faces of the ’24 MA class litter the space, mocking the cutthroat, disposable personal dynamics within creative institutions. 

Chaotic, absurd, and irreverent, the performance results in the artist being kicked out of their own exhibition as they express frustration through attempting to sell the last stock of their dying dream through performative optimism, exposing the pressures of conformity and the absurdity of seeking validation within rigid, unbalanced, unforgiving art-world systems.
2024

KNITTED TONGUES
Formed at Central Saint Martins, this experimental sound collective blended immersive sonic environments, live music, drone, and improvisation. Their work incorporated a bowed bass, electric guitar, dual-headed electric violin, and synthesizers, layered into revolving textures that are at once meditative, unsettling, and physically resonant.

During their time living under the same roof, Zanetti, Douglas, and Doodles investigated the tension between a body at war, control, trust, and chance, sound and silence, and the power of communication beyond speech. Live sets took place throughout the UK, including Lethaby Gallery, Avalon Cafe, and The Greendoor Store, as well as over the airwaves with Grey Clay Radio.

Their 2024 release, no one in europe knows how to scream anymore, compiles live sets recorded over several months. (It didn’t end well, just like any band worth its salt.)
2023-2024

DOMESTICADA: YOU ALWAYS SAID YOU WANTED A DOG, AND I LEARNED WHAT THAT MEANT (NOTES ON CONTROL, OWNERSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN DREAM)
During her MA at Central Saint Martins, Zanetti performs as the dog—a mythologized figure of loyalty and the American Dream. In a personal rupture, violence and resentment are displaced onto the animal as a stand-in for herself: appearing safe and cared for, yet in reality cold, sick, and weak. Fear, affection, and domination are projected into the nightmares of the creature you never wanted.
2023

PARKHAUS15
What began as the practical management of Parkhaus15—curating exhibitions, coordinating artists, and running a gallery space emerges, in hindsight, as a subtle, durational performance. Parkhaus15, then, is both venue and artwork, in which the act of administration is reimagined as performance.

The artist, by inhabiting the role of the institution itself, unwittingly performs the gestures and rituals that define a platform. Every action, from emails sent to shows mounted, functions as a component of a larger, performative inquiry into how one might navigate, embody, or subvert the institution.
2020-2021

NOW WHAT?
A series of staged, hyper-photoshopped images shot during the artist’s BA graduation ceremony, streamed as a YouTube slideshow during the height of America’s COVID lockdown, when society was fraying, systemic failures were exposed, and personal agency felt impossible. 

Exhibited on an animated digital photo frame at Meno Parkas during Düsseldorf Art Week, the work confronts the helplessness of being trapped in a situation beyond one’s control, revealing the fragility of everything around us. 2020

BERLIN, FLORIDA, USA
Set in the University of Central Florida darkroom where the artist worked during her time pursuing her degree in Photography, the space was transformed into a Great Value Berghain: a mash-up of a grotesque, hyperreal techno temple and Orlando theme-park experience, complete with sights and smells. 

 The artist performed as a DJ and hired a bouncer channeling Sven Marquardt, enforcing a strict “almost nobody gets in” policy that turned the queue into a performance of its own. Posters plastered across Orlando lured unsuspecting visitors into this Epcot-style simulation of Berlin nightlife. The work explored how spaces can be flattened into caricature, the psychic terrain of being out of place.
2019


PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE
At Stardust Coffee and Video, a peeling, swamp-side relic, we perform life as if it’s already decomposing. A collaborative performance with Carlos Quebrada, we confront the temporary.

Everything is designed to fade, to wear, to expire.
The performance unfolds like a machine beginning to self-destruct: familiar routines loop and stutter, videos flicker, shadows stretch and break, but obsolescence is not tragedy—it is life’s rhythm, a sputtering poetry of impermanence. The work vanishes the moment it was made. Zanetti’s first foray into sound, a realization.
2019
CHRONOLOGIE DÉLABRÉE
My early photographic work in Paris documented fragments of advertising and public messaging partially torn down in the Métro. These gestures are unintentional yet poetic. What was meant to disappear lingers in residue. Exhibited at scale, the series flattened these layers of impermanence, the unplanned, the overlooked, and the everyday. 

These works foreshadowed a developing practice attuned to traces of the unresolved: the residue of human action, the tension between the overlooked and the amplified, the accidental and curated, presence and absence, and what exists beyond language.
2018

GESTALT
The film destabilizes our trust in reality through a deliberate distancing effect. A scene unfolds like a lived moment, only for the camera to pull back and reveal it as a photograph of a vast mountain landscape with snow falling in front of it, flanked by real trees in Marienplatz, München.
In this Brechtian gesture, we are betrayed and amused: we are drawn in, then held at a distance, forced to reckon with the fact that all things mediate reality rather than reveal it. Looking back, it was really about relationships—about being drawn close, then kept at arm’s length, about the way images can be staged as “proof” of something rather than capturing something real—but at the time? Lmao, I just thought it was funny.2017