The streets in Valencia that will not come back to listen to us because they already know that those in Pescara drown out our voices following your footsteps, while Rome conceals the streets that we will no longer drive along to the rhythm of your steering wheel, and Coruna floods the streets that we will no longer wander together as a result of Fuerteventura hiding its desert under our tribal dance, while Puerto del Rosario completely forgets about us – for you, some say, are in heaven (in itagnolo [Italian-Spanish] in the original).
I never wanted to write this and I don’t want to do it today either. First, I used the delay in sending the graphic information from my beloved Catia Verna, whose house I had returned to for the occasion, after twenty years apart. Then I used the work filling my head in my small office on the banks of the Arousa estuary as an excuse. Finally, I left on a trip for a few days. However, today, sitting in my library, I can no longer put this off.
The First Paglia Day was celebrated in the city of Pescara, in the middle of the Adriatic Riviera, on 9 July. It was organised by Catia Verna, a founding member of the Pescara Ecoteca in the early 2000s, to honour the memory of Luigi Pagliarini, my brother from Rome, who recently passed away in that city.
Luigi Pagliarini was one of those pioneers who anticipated his times since he stopped following them and went forward faster than expected. His main activity – and the reason I met him many years ago – was that he was the first artist to use the tools of artificial intelligence tools in his electronic compositions.
He also frequently employed software-art, and in this he had many companions. He did this entirely as an autodidact, since he had only studied Psychology, which was the reason he moved to Rome and where he was an active member of the Rivista di Psicologia dell’Arte, founded and directed by the renowned Sergio Lombardo; the famous ‘Pagliarini Code’ was published in issue 29, in which Pagliarini transferred computerised composition systems to analogue reality, transforming it into a children’s game. The simplicity of this prevented me from understanding it when Paglia (the affectionate name we called him) spoke about it himself and which I only understand now, after his widow Federica Pesce explained it to me in his home studio.
This is a house he personally transformed when he was nearing the end of his life. He made it into a permanent installation like that in Kurt Schwitters’s house – his ‘Merzbau’ in Hanover – with the difference that in the ‘PagliaHouse’ everything is created from a razor-sharp perspective, sometimes appearing as a nadir (in true frontal opposition to the ceiling), signifying that the last days of his life was pure prostration, lightened only by the composition he was making for the entire house and in which the major role was played by the decoding of his ‘Pagliarini Code’ in the main room.
Entering that house and returning to his works I had already seen in Rome – some of which he had honoured me with by participating in several exhibitions – brought back to mind the endless conversations I’d had with him in various Spanish and Italian enclaves over the years, and whose statements I never forgot because time has sanctioned them as being highly important.
The first: the day will come when we will hire services to make ourselves invisible to the machine controlling our hyper-connected society, something that has been happening for a long time but was impossible to detect at the time it was being formulated. The second will also take place but is yet to happen. It responds to Luigi Pagliarini’s ‘first law of robotics’, i.e. a robot will be intelligent when it decides to end its own life. He dedicated an artwork, ‘Intelligenza’ (‘Intelligence’), to this law, which I exhibited because I felt it was completely well-founded.
I could go on describing the details of his innumerable artistic and scientific achievements – he seemed like a mad scientist – but I want to highlight this Primo Paglia Day, a tribute which I found hard to attend because I had not completely accepted his death, which took place at the Zara Spiaggia Bar in his home town, a traditional bathing establishment on the Abruzzo Riviera.
The tribute opened with a concert by Wogiagia, an eleven-member reggae group that delighted the audience and for which I was grateful because they lessened the feelings of guilt at celebrating the death of a friend, and sent many of those present into a trance-like state which Paglia would have greatly appreciated.
Afterwards, a short film was screened from the book he composed during his convalescence, in collaboration with Federico Galdiero, ‘Il Pianeta Mente’ (Planet Mind/Lies), in which he passes on his interpretation of the recursive reality of living energy to his children, especially the young Lorenzo, but also Paolo, the son he had when married to Floriana Orazi.
The café’s recreational area showed works by artists who wanted to help honour it: Lica Cavo, with ‘Pneuma’; Sara Marzari, with ‘Prendimi tra le tue braccia’; Kokoro, with ‘Dualità’; Isabella de Luca and Gloria Sulli, with ‘Mushroom Bubbles’.
In addition, I contributed documentaries on various works Paglia had created, or collaborated on, which I edited, with an emphasis on what he considered to be his masterpiece, ‘Il Cimitero della Comunicazione’ (‘The Cemetery of Communication’). This consisted of a specific intervention in the first airport, now abandoned, on the island of Fuerteventura, where he planted 512 tombstones containing technological waste to denounce the consumption of natural resources produced by new technology, exhaustion that is largely accompanied by wars and labour exploitation, including child labour.
In this it was also clear why we now see how fuel consumption for the immediate delivery of online purchases generates a chain of pollution that visiting the nearest shop to see what they have never implied. This is now called proximity consumption because of its infrequency.
During the screening of his latest performance documentary in Coruna, ‘Fatherboard. The Superavatar’, his assistant on that occasion, Demian Battisti, revived Paglia himself dressed in his counter-technological resistance suit.
The tribute ended with a DIY sequence started by Max Attak (Max Leggieri and Massimo Coscia), Paglia’s close friends and accomplices, and concluded with DJ Globster.
Nilo Casares, In memoriam: celebrando con Luigi Pagliarini el Primo Paglia Day, published on “Makma”, November 26, 2023
