fridas #2
FRIDAS (Freedom in Rights Identities driven through Arts and Sports), Cooperation Partnerships – ERASMUS-SPORT-2025-SCP, is a two-year European project that combines sport and art to promote health, challenge discrimination, and foster inclusivity, with a particular focus on gender equality and accessibility for people with disabilities.
Involving five countries – Italy, Croatia, Bulgaria, Spain, and Greece – FRIDAS engages the Italian wheelchair rugby team ASD Romanes Wheelchair Rugby as mentors. Through gamification, storytelling, and participatory artistic practices, the project aims to foster empathy and awareness while creating a space where all identities are valued and inclusion becomes a central element of the rugby community.
Through the bodily empathy practices developed by the ASD Romanes Wheelchair Rugby team and the audiovisual research of Monkeys Video Lab, the artists involved in this second edition, the project seeks to promote learning, inclusion, and awareness of one’s own body and of relationships with others.
In this new phase, Monkeys Video Lab will work with participants – young people from the partner countries – through audiovisual workshops and film production processes. These activities will lead, in 2027, to the creation of an immersive multimedia installation designed to engage the public in a participatory experience.
The FRIDAS project is coordinated by Latitudo (Italy) and brings together several partners: Liminal (Greece) and five rugby organizations—Bulgarian Rugby Federation (Bulgaria), U.S. Primavera Rugby (Italy), ASD Romanes Wheelchair Rugby (Italy), RK Zagreb – Ragbi Klub Zagreb (Croatia), and Menorca Rugby Club (Spain).
Another key element of the project is the creation of an educational video game on the Roblox platform, developed by Mekit Studio in collaboration with the young participants and the artists. The game promotes inclusivity by allowing players to experience adaptive sports and encounter architectural barriers, helping raise awareness about accessibility while highlighting the importance of teamwork. Players will explore how athletes with disabilities face and overcome real-life challenges.
The project is further supported by a network of associated partners of national importance that have granted their patronage: CONI, FISPES, the Croatian Rugby Federation (Hrvatski ragbijaški savez), the Association “Nyama nevazmozhni neshta” (Varna), the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and FIR (Italian Rugby Federation).
monkeys video lab
artist
Monkeys Video Lab specializes in audiovisual production and art documentation. The three founding members, Simone Nazzareno Valente, Alessio Rucchetta, and Valerio Sammartino, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where they met in 2014 and began their artistic and professional collaboration.
Over the two-year duration of the project, their synergistic work with all partners will generate reflections, narratives, and critical perspectives that will serve as the conceptual foundation for the development of the video game.
Monkeys Video Lab will also produce original visual and multimedia content to be integrated into the virtual world of the game, contributing to a more immersive and layered experience.
Within the FRIDAS project, Monkeys Video Lab will play a central role by leading five in-person creative workshops, one in each participating country. These workshops will be essential for gathering visual and storytelling materials that will directly inform the development of the video game.
Through photography, video, and sound, themes of diversity, equality, and resilience will be explored. Young participants will be guided in the use of various multimedia techniques, with the aim of breaking down physical barriers and prejudice.
The collective creates art while simultaneously exploring new ways of narrating it, combining aesthetic research with technological experimentation. Curiosity, rigor, dialogue, and collaboration are at the core of their practice; they believe that diverse perspectives make every project stronger and more meaningful. In this sense, the FRIDAS project represents an ideal context for Monkeys Video Lab, where artistic research intersects with social engagement, transforming the video game into a space for participation, inclusion, and shared storytelling.