Roberto Paci Dalò is an Italian author, composer and musician, film maker and theatre director, sound and visual artist, radio-maker. He is the co-founder and director of the performing arts ensemble Giardini Pensili and he has been the artistic director of Wikimania 2016 Esino Lario. He won the Premio Napoli per la lingua e la cultura italiana in 2015.
Life and career
After musical, visual, and architecture studies in Fiesole, Faenza and Ravenna, in 1993 he receives the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program Fellowship. He taught Media Dramaturgy and New Media at the university of Siena and teaches Interaction Design at UNIRSM Design Università degli Studi della Repubblica di San Marino. Since 2017 he is founder and director of Usmaradio, radio station and Research Centre for Radiophonic Studies.
In 1993 he conceives the project Publiphono – based on the public address system of the Rimini beach – used to create environmental audio performance along 15 km of the coast; several artists were commissioned to produce pieces for it. In 1994 with Marina Abramović and Barbara Bloom he has been invited to the project “Bildende Kunst auf dem Theater” at Hebbel-Theater, Berlin. In 1995 the Kronos Quartet premiered at the Vienna Opera House his composition Nodas. In 1997 he creates Trance Bakxai, an artist's rave inspired by Euripides. This project has been presented several times in industrial archeology venues. In 2001 he stages the performance work Metamorfosi created through a one-month film scanning of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Roma EUR: the modernist icon from 1942. The performance became then a film which has been part of the official selection of the 54th Locarno Film Festival. In the same year he presented the film RAX, dedicated to the artist Robert Adrian X, at the Vienna Kunsthalle. In 2002 he creates with the English artist and musician Philip Jeck the film and concert performance Mush Room. 2004 he co-creates with Olga Neuwirth the staged concert Italia anno zero after texts by Antonio Gramsci, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giacomo Leopardi widely presented across Europe. 2006 he creates the music-theatre production Organo magico organo laico featuring Mouse on Mars and Icarus musicians at the REC Festival (Teatro Valli, Reggio Emilia). In the same year he creates the music-theatre work Cenere after texts by Amelia Rosselli and Gabriele Frasca (Teatro Comunale di Monfalcone).
In 2007 he presents his solo exhibition City Works - urban explorations and interventions in the cities of Berlin, Ciudad de México, Linz, Napoli, Rimini, Rome, Vancouver - at the Gallery SESV (University of Florence - Department of Architecture). In the same year he presents his solo exhibition Sparks (site-specific installation and drawings on paper) at the contemporary arts centre Palazzo delle Papesse Siena and the videoinstallation Shadows at Studio Zero, the exhibition space of Duomo Hotel created by Ron Arad in Rimini. In the same year he presents a triple project at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. In that occasion he performed Napoli (the historical work created in 1993 and already presented in Linz in 1995). Napoli is an immersive multi-channel sound portrait of the Italian city. Within the festival he premiered the film IMA Fiction #3 Heidi Grundmann (a portrait of the seminal figure in radio and telecommunication world) and the electronic performance Elektra.
In 2008 as part of the Napoli Teatro Festival he directs and composes the cycle of 11 music-theatre performances L'assedio delle ceneri featuring actors like Umberto Orsini, Franco Branciaroli, Massimo Popolizio a.o. Paci Dalò created the sculpture "Sun Tzu" under invitation of the Galleria Civica di Modena (2010) and the work "Smallville#1" as part of the Bologna Art First 2011. In 2011 he presented the site-specific large scale music-theatre work De bello Gallico - Enklave Rimini.
In 2012 he creates in Shanghai the audio-visual performance Ye Shanghai; the project deals with several aspects of the Shanghainese life before 1949. At the core of this work is the story of the Shanghai Ghetto, an area of approximately one square mile located in the Hongkou District of Japanese-occupied Shanghai. It housed about 23,000 Jewish refugees relocated by the Japanese-issued Proclamation Concerning Restriction of Residence and Business of Stateless Refugees, after they fled from the German-occupied Europe before and during World War II. He produced a series of Berlin projects based on Heiner Müller's texts: Greuelmärchen - sound/video installation (Internationale Heiner Müller Gesellschaft, Berlin), Schwarzes Licht, Roter Schnee.