Goodbye Salvatore, we will miss you!

With these few words we wish to remember Salvatore Iaconesi, artist and friend, who deeply touched our spaces and our humanity. The thought and the processes he sowed over these years will keep fermenting in us and in many others, surely, for a long time and without rush.

As he told us last winter, updating us about his illness: “And now it’s your problem!”

I owe a lot to Salvatore Iaconesi. Having always worked on art and technology, I owe a lot to his work as a digital artist and innovator. For us, and surely for many others, Sal was a point of reference. The many texts written more or less recently are enough to grasp the depth of thought of a visionary artist, who turned his relationship with technology not into a mere stylistic mark, but into an urgent expressive necessity in an ever-more technologised society. Digital art as a mechanism for reclaiming technological awareness, for sharing and disseminating, for reflection on the digital principles and processes that increasingly shape our lives. And not as a tool for technological virtuosity, not as an instrument of separation.

I owe a lot to Salvatore Iaconesi’s thought, but as a man I owe a lot to Salvatore as a friend.

The first time I heard about him was for La Cura, when he decided to share with the world his illness and his treatment process — an artistic and social performance that struck me deeply. It was 2010. I later had the chance to meet him briefly at conferences and events where, together with Oriana, he was invited to speak, managing — as he often did — to upend the thinking and the path of everything being said. Nothing was ever taken for granted when Salvatore took the floor. His ability to amaze and to be amazed. A word he always said when he heard something beautiful, something new, but also something simple and affectionate: “Meraviglia!” — wonder!

But the moment when I really met Salvatore and Oriana was in November 2015 in Capri, for an event organised by another great friend and innovator, Alex Giordano. Hacking Melanoma.

Alex called me to be a tutor for the process-innovation part, but obviously the topic was Hacking, and melanoma, and naturally Salvatore was, for all of us there, the voice to listen to; just as naturally, for Salvatore the most important thing was building a voice that was truly common and shared.

I have a vivid memory in Capri of two moments that intimately changed me, and that we often used to recall with Sal and Oriana at the various dinners we shared over these years:

A first, extremely intimate moment, when we stopped after dinner to talk — about everything — me, him, Oriana and Alex, on the hotel terrace facing the sea, until dawn, waiting for the sun to clear our thoughts again. On that night, which entered each of our hearts, we truly became friends. We talked about everything. And from that night Salvatore opened my mind once more to interpenetration — to the idea that nothing and no one can be so closed that they cannot be interpenetrated, and that in interpenetration lies the truth of things. To hack in order to crack things open, to look at every phenomenon from a perspective other than the usual, to read the facets we did not even imagine it had. To build a new imaginary of processes. Still today, that is what we try to do here at Chirale too. I started from there.

The second moment was crazy. Salvatore in the hotel hall in Capri, explaining to some particularly authoritarian — rather than authoritative — university professors that no one had the right to extractively use the data of anybody else’s body, even if it might support medical research. The fact that he was the one saying it, having decided to share his entire sick body in the performance La Cura, gave the statement an absolute value.

And he said it in a simple, effective, performative, interpenetrating way: while the professor argued his scientific position, Salvatore — in front of him, without any aggressiveness or presumption — kept repeating loudly “It’s my body!”. For 10, 15, 20 minutes, I cannot say exactly. A single sentence, the resolve, the simplicity and the depth of the concept: in this system where each of us continuously gives away their data without any awareness, “it’s my body!”

Salvatore’s vision is enormous; thinking it over these days, it seems even clearer: while many love to make their lives public in order to keep them essentially private from others, Salvatore always kept his life private in order to essentially share it. Private and shared, like his art, like his work. “Salvatore never believed in superheroes, but in the Open Code”.

From Capri grew a beautiful friendship, and also professional collaborations — as when Salvatore and Oriana asked Chirale to create, together, Obiettivo, the first datapoietic artwork now held in the permanent collection of the Farnesina, and to take part in the development of Datapoiesis. In those months we shared Spazio Chirale with them.

Working together, for Salvatore, was important. He never liked to work alone — always with Oriana, even in the shaping of thought, and always with many others, because he firmly believed in collective work.

Recently we had collaborated on Nuovo Abitare and on the installation What a Wonderful World, which is currently at MAXXI. The last work of Sal and Oriana, and of Nuovo Abitare, before he left. The opening at MAXXI, our last hug.

Goodbye Sal! I know you will forgive me if this text perhaps does not have the irreverence and power you would have deserved. But it does carry our affection for you. I know that, receiving it, you will smile over it, and looking at us with an open face you will exclaim, as always: “Meraviglia!”

— Leonardo Zaccone