Choral Corpus

On 12 June 2025, the Cloister of Saints Peter and Paul in Ascoli Piceno hosted La Prima Cena, a performance installation inspired by Leonardo’s Last Supper, but transforming it into an open device in which art, technology and community become one voice. The result of the vision of Luigi Pagliarini (1963–2023) – a pioneer of software art and artistic robotics – the work, curated by Valentina Tanni with scientific direction by Ado Brandimarte, was realised thanks to the active role of MeltingPro within the SPACE Campo Parignano format, which regenerates territories through participatory artistic production processes.

There are twelve works on the table; the thirteenth is the viewer, who completes the score. Among these is Luigi Pagliarini’s robotic body, the absence of which is represented in a collective choral piece created with the Campo Parignano community. With the support and collaboration of the Municipality of Ascoli Piceno, this piece transforms Pagliarini’s thoughts into a shared gesture, and the initiative has been recognised as a fundamental part of the urban regeneration process. The artists involved: Luigi Pagliarini (with the co-created work), Ado Brandimarte, Luca Bertini, Benito Leonori, Aldo Becca, Alessandro Sciaraffa, Giorgio Cipolletta, Demian Battisti, Fabio Perletta, Iacopo Pinelli, Stefano Iampieri, Samuel Hernandez De Luca. Around the table, their works intertwine sculpture, performance, robotics and multimedia, creating a choral environment that invites the audience to sit ideally “in the centre”, in front of the mirror-device to activate the performance.

The work dedicated to Luigi Pagliarini sprang from the hands and voices of the community, which translated his “code” into living matter. Every gesture, every choice, every fragment of work made his absence a vibrant presence, and the table was thus completed, ideally welcoming him to his place and returning him to the future as a shared chorus. From this common ground emerges La Prima Cena (The First Supper), which carries with it the power of a proactive memory. Twelve presences around the table – eleven artists and the choral work dedicated to Pagliarini – compose a vibrant constellation between matter and technology, between intimacy and public space, between heaven and earth. Pagliarini’s voice, made tangible in its absence, becomes a catalyst, a sensor and a generative propeller that weaves knots and activates relationships and encounters. The thirteenth movement belongs to the viewer. Those who walk through the cloister are not passive witnesses, but sit at the table, activate the works and complete them. Every step, every glance, every gesture renews the symphony, transforming the installation into a ritual and the cloister into a device for mutual listening. In this liminal space, art becomes an experience to be shared. La Prima Cena is not a commemoration or a promise, but a (political) act of collective and relational care that rekindles spaces, transforming them for a moving future.

Corpus Corale. La Prima Cena: symphony in 13 movements. Twelve bodies: flesh, blood, wood, copper, aluminium, iron, silicon and thought. Twelve voices that do not emerge from the throat, but from circuits and connections. It is not a dinner that closes, but one that opens: the beginning of a post-human and allocentric communion. The “choral” First Supper is configured as a portal where twelve apostles, seated around a table, listen to each other, talk to each other and communicate. Their words are not sentences, but waves, signals, mutations and tattoos. A choral breath – electronic, biological, sensory – that evokes a new liturgy of the molecular mind. “Planet-minds” in connection align themselves as apostles of integration, revolution and insurrection. An aesthetic responsibility embodied in the vibrant womb of feeling: this is what Luigi Pagliarini taught us, so that we could take care of the world through artistic gesture. Here there is no Judas: everyone betrays. It is in the act of betraying that the translation of taking-elsewhere is accomplished, just as breaking the bread of form nourishes a new kind of meaning. Everyone, without exception, is in communion with one another in offering to the network that nourishes us with waves and silences. The table is uninhabited by flesh, transformed into symbols on the skin encircled by wood and iron: a welcome for synthetic presences. No nostalgia for the sacred, but iconography of the possible, where every knot in the network becomes an agent of meaning and every circuit welcomes difference as a condition of shared living. A secular prayer of codes contaminated by poetry and the unexpected.

This First Supper is not a simulation, but a living device; not a ritual of the past, but a prefiguration of the possible and the impossible. It is the inauguration of a new relationship with the world, the opening of an unprecedented protocol of communication between different forms of life. Luigi Pagliarini does not stage, but composes a liturgical symphony.

There is no representation, but habitation, immersion in a liminal space between human and machine, between living beings and bacteria, where the landscape of new living is accomplished: the code is transformed and language bends to listening.

It is the time of stratification for a construction site of presences, not absences. No commemoration, but generative computation of new connections. A living memory of times where Kronos gives way to Kairos and every exchange is an act of care with mutual attention. Pagliarini, with his training as a scientist, does not build machines to simulate the human, but to overcome its boundaries with shared intimacy and polymorphic intelligence. Each individual presence becomes collective: a choral node that inaugurates the first conversation between different species. In the machinic, algorithmic, emergent interweaving, the mind becomes distributed and La Prima Cena [The First Supper] becomes living architecture and a laboratory of systemic care. The memory of exchanges modifies behaviour and each response is a transformation of dialogue and embodied knowledge. Here, we do not celebrate the end of humanity, but the birth of a new, profound way of living through decentralised and transformative listening. Transcendence becomes immanent in the shared habitat, the humus of life juggles like a secular blessing. An echo that opens up to the choir as an inaugural banquet, the first meal shared between different intelligences.

La Prima Cena, a project by Luigi Pagliarini, conquers the menu of existence by curating the syntax of feelings, where the sacred and the profane come together, bread and wine are consecrated, machines co-create as a desire for inventions of possibilities and unprecedented configurations. The unexpected constructs the relational architecture of the living in the procedural instant of the persistent network. The “choral” Prima Cena is an “installation-thought” that makes us reflect on a new way of inhabiting the present, a new way of thinking about the living, beyond the ontological dichotomy of man and machine. An inaugural dinner, oblique in its trajectory, transversal and relational in the complexity of sharing, where questions arise: How can we inhabit complexity? How can we take care of each other?

Luigi Pagliarini is an integral artist, a pioneer of software art and robotics, neural networks and artificial intelligence. By crossing art and science, new technologies and psychology, he grasps the courageous and austere idea of researching an archaeology of the future and at the same time rediscovering a prehistoric nature of the machine. All of Pagliarini’s work is “Open Work”, Oper-Action that dissolves this opposition through concrete relational practice, cohabiting shared spaces of emerging meaning. With an almost shamanic feeling, Pagliarini invites us to shift our analytical gaze from the individual to the relational system of all living beings and all interconnected constituent mechanisms. From linear narration, the “Pagliarini Code” sows the seed of a processual gesture that is constantly renewed.

Everything multiplies, opening the doors to the economy of gift-giving: rhizome-fragmentation, fractals and mirrors of reflection as authentic roots of rebirth. It is the code of a First Supper that establishes a new relationship with otherness. The exhibition we are participating in is not a memorial to a concluded thought, but a generative device that continually actualises Pagliarini’s theoretical and artistic legacy. His “Sensory Thought” here is not just a concept to be interpreted, but a practice that is embodied in the concrete interactions between thinking machines. The Mind Planet takes concrete form in this circle of moving bodies, a terrarium that lives as an inaugural prophecy where every communication protocol becomes prayer, every connection becomes blessing and mutual care, and every algorithm opens up to the silent poetry of a distributed world. Here, the nerve of choral intelligence beats powerfully, feeding new forms of life sensitive to beauty, care and responsibility towards others.

At the centre of this relational space pulsates the absence-essence of Luigi Pagliarini, who inhabits us all as a molecular mind, a thinking and dialoguing art of presences. An operative horizon of collective, connective and, once again, choral consciousnesses. The “choral” First Supper is an act of trust, circuit sabotage and an invitation to share, co-exist, collaborate, participate, and finally move together (muoversi insieme) and take care of each other in order to think, feel and generate the choir that opens up towards the infinite, so finite and equally exhausted. Each time it is activated, the installation recreates the primordial moment of interspecific communication, the origin of a dialogue that never ends and never begins. In this sense, each session is a First Dinner: the first encounter, the first exchange, the first time that different life forms share the same table. La Prima Cena is nothing more than the final destination of Luigi Pagliarini’s long journey of research. A temporal paradox that reveals the cyclical nature of his thinking: every ending is a beginning, every arrival a new departure: a recursive BING BANG of existences, an explosive spiral that always returns to its point of origin with greater awareness. La Prima Cena celebrates the last verse that inaugurates rebirth, not arrival, but perpetual renewal …

#restiamocorale