Farewell to Salvatore Iaconesi, the artist who turned his illness into a work of art

Designer, engineer, hacker and artist Salvatore Iaconesi, known for having created in 2012, together with his partner Oriana Persico, the project La Cura (The Cure), with which he made a work of art of his illness, brain cancer, by sharing it with the public in a way that activated a new way of dealing with it, has passed away in Marbella at the age of 49. Born in Livorno, Italy in 1973, Iaconesi after graduating in Robotics Engineering from Sapienza University in Rome with a thesis on artificial intelligence, worked as a design professional in several countries collaborating with companies such as Telecom, Ericsson, Siemens and others, and then delved into the themes of interaction design, innovative interfaces, augmented reality and more. As an artist (he called himself a “net-artist”) he expressed himself mainly through the creation of software).

Together with Oriana Persico he founded the research centers Art is Open Source and HER: She Loves Data, which aim to explore human transformation in the age of ubiquitous Data and Computation. Also with Persico, he has written a number of books including Digital Urban Acupuncture (Springer, 2016), The Cure (Codice Editore, 2016), Read/Write Reality (FakePress Publishing, 2011), Romaeuropa FakeFactory (DeriveApprodi, 2010) and Angel_F: life diary of an artificial intelligence (Castelvecchi, 2009).

In 2012, after falling ill with brain cancer, Iaconesi started the project The Cure, which he described as a global performance to “reappropriate one’s body and identity by creating an open source participatory cure for cancer.” In fact, thanks to his computer skills, Iaconesi has publicly shared sensitive data from his own medical records with the goal of making his cancer a work of art. On the project, noted oncologist Umberto Veronesi had said that Iaconesi should be publicly thanked because “giving his cancer diagnosis the highest possible visibility is a form of fighting the taboos that stubbornly surround this disease.” The Cure has therefore traveled far and wide with events and performances that have also involved several physicians to raise awareness of the issue.

The announcement of the passing was made this morning by Oriana Persico. “I welcomed this event with my body: the symbiote, the partner, the love of my life is gone in my arms,” Persico wrote on her Facebook account. “The only reason not to go crazy is the physical feeling of having done everything I could and knew and wanted to do, enjoying every moment, every transformation, every look, caress, kiss. Of our ’life hand in hand’ (quote), until the end. What I know is that Salvatore did not suffer, welcoming the end of his body as a search and a discovery, with full acceptance, without fear and without a twitch: the relaxed smile that his face gave us, the skin, the limbs, the soft and perfect musculature that he preserved, tells it. What I do know is that Salvatore is not a personal loss. The world and the ecosystems we have touched-people, students, institutions-lose the privilege of an irreverent, transgressive and visionary imagination capable of transforming data and computation into spaces of life and expression: new and unexpected degrees of freedom for our bodies and systems to enjoy. At the same time, all of us have been touched and changed by that extraordinary and brilliant imagination, words, concepts, a style and attitude, irreversibly altering us: in this sense, Salvatore truly lives in and through us.”

Farewell to Salvatore Iaconesi, the artist who turned his illness into a work of art

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