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Roberto Paci Dalò is an author, composer, director, visual and sound artist, musician, performer, and radio maker. His artistic research originates from the encounter between drawing and sound, two parallel forms of writing through which he creates perceptual spaces where voice, images, bodies, memory, and places interact. Art, science, nature, and voice are among the key concepts that define his practice.

For over forty years he has developed an artistic practice based on listening and the construction of space, expressed through music, theatre, radio, cinema, installation, and digital media. His work consists in creating temporary and permanent environments in which artworks, performers, and audiences participate in the construction of a shared sensory experience.

He describes himself as a designer of perceptual spaces: physical, sonic, and immaterial environments in which sound, voice, images, texts, and architecture generate conditions for experience. Theatre, concerts, installations, cinema, radio, public lectures, or conversations may all take the form of performative events—moments in which everyday time is suspended, opening a distinctive space for attention and participation.

Through sound, voice, and space, the artwork becomes a ritual event, a form of meditation and collective encounter: a space-time in which the audience is not a passive element but an active participant in shaping the experience.

He studied music and visual arts between Ravenna and Fiesole. Since the 1980s, his work has developed through a continuous dialogue between musical composition, visual arts, writing, and spatial design. Drawing is a fundamental tool within his practice: maps, notebooks, diagrams, and annotations accompany the creation of his works and often become autonomous artworks in their own right.

Lines, maps, and marks serve a compositional function analogous to sound: they orient, connect, and construct pathways. Many of his books are facsimile reproductions of notebooks in which texts, drawings, maps, images, and project materials coexist. The notebook becomes a cartography of the creative process, a place where visual and musical thought converge.

Cartography, soundscape, and cultural geography are central tools in his research. Through sounds, voices, archives, and traces of places, he creates works in which territory, memory, and imagination intertwine. His practice may be understood as a cartography of listening, in which drawing and sound become tools for traversing and understanding contemporary space, while listening itself becomes a practice of preserving memory.

This poetics lies at the heart of PNEUMA. Giardini Pensili: un paesaggio sonoro, a publication gathering materials, images, texts, and reflections related to the first twenty years of Giardini Pensili. Conceived as a working notebook, the volume presents a conception of sound as landscape and composition as a journey across both physical and imaginary territories.

He is among the European pioneers in the artistic use of the Internet and digital technologies, employing them as creative, performative, and exhibition environments since the early 1990s. In his work, the network is not merely a technical tool but a cultural and perceptual space in which new narrative and relational forms can emerge.

During the 1990s he developed the concept of media dramaturgy (drammaturgia dei media), a reflection on the role of dramaturgical composition beyond theatre, applied to the narrative, technological, and spatial dispositifs of contemporary culture.

Since 1985 he has been one of the founders of Giardini Pensili, a research and production organization active in music theatre, sound research, radio, and the performing arts, with a physical space conceived as a place for artistic work, encounters, and residencies.

In 1995, at the dawn of the Web, he founded Radio Lada, one of the world’s first web radios dedicated to art, conceived as an exhibition space for sound art and radio-based artistic practices. Developed within the research activities of Giardini Pensili and the festival LADA – L’Arte dell’Ascolto, the project anticipated the idea of the Internet as a curatorial and performative environment, transforming the network into a place devoted to the production, dissemination, and experience of sound art.

Radio Lada was founded on the belief that radio is not merely a broadcasting medium but a creative environment in which voice, sound, silence, memory, and imagination generate forms of experience. Its research approaches listening as both an artistic practice and a relational space: an invisible composition capable of activating places and communities through sound.

Today the project continues as a radio exhibition platform within Usmaradio – Centro di Ricerca per la Radiofonia dell’Università degli Studi della Repubblica di San Marino, sustaining a line of research initiated in the 1990s on the relationship between radio, sound art, performance, and contemporary listening practices.

In 1999 he conceived and directed Itaca – il palcoscenico elettronico del Teatro di Roma, an infrastructure project and media lab established within Teatro Argentina, dedicated to the convergence of theatre, music, radio, digital arts, and telematic networks. From 2006 to 2016 he created and directed Velvet Factory within Velvet Club in Rimini, a laboratory devoted to music, visual arts, performance, and electronic culture.

Since 2017 he has been the founder and director of Usmaradio – Centro di Ricerca per la Radiofonia dell’Università degli Studi della Repubblica di San Marino, where he teaches Exhibit and Experience Design. His teaching is grounded in the belief that designing a space means designing a relationship: environments are not containers for artworks but devices capable of generating experiences.

Since the 1980s he has developed a substantial body of theatrical, music-theatre, radio, and performance works in which stage, composition, voice, electronics, and space continuously transform one another. He has written, composed, and directed around fifty theatre and music-theatre works presented internationally, while also producing an extensive body of radio works and Hörspiele for European broadcasters.

Many of his works move across different formats: they originate as stage productions and evolve into sound installations, films, publications, site-specific projects, radio broadcasts, or performative devices. This continuous transformation of materials is one of the defining characteristics of his artistic practice.

His works take shape not only in theatres, museums, and concert halls, but also within historic architecture, industrial sites, natural landscapes, urban spaces, and digital environments. Every project begins by listening to the context in which it is created: acoustics, memory, history, and the physical characteristics of a place become compositional materials. Space is not the backdrop of the work but an active presence that determines both its structure and its experience.

He has collaborated with leading performers and authors of the international contemporary stage, directing, among others, Umberto Orsini, Arnoldo Foà, Franco Branciaroli, Sandro Lombardi, Enzo Moscato, Roberto Latini, Massimo Popolizio, Marcello Sambati, Rita Maffei, Anna Bonaiuto, Patrizia Valduga, and Silvio Orlando. His compositions have been performed by musicians and ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Stefano Scodanibbio, Julia Kent, Sainkho Namtchylak, David Moss, and Tom Cora.

As a musician he performs with clarinet, voice, and electronics, developing a practice that combines composition, improvisation, and performative presence. His long-term research into the musical traditions of Southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Eastern Mediterranean—from Greece to Albania, from Armenia to Georgia, and from Romania to Bulgaria—has deeply informed his relationship with the clarinet as well as with popular and ritual vocal traditions.

This research has also developed through direct immersion in territories and communities, spending extended periods in places of worship and listening such as mosques, synagogues, and Orthodox churches, where music, voice, and ritual continue to function as living practices of collective experience.

Voice is one of the fundamental elements of his work: a physical material, a living archive, and a space of relationship between body, memory, language, and environment.

Poetry occupies a central place in his artistic research. Through collaborations with contemporary poets and an ongoing dialogue with the poetic tradition, he explores orality as the original dimension of the text: poetry returns to being body, breath, phoné, and presence through performance, music, and voice.

His research also engages with the classical tradition, understood as a living territory of forms, images, and listening practices. Through work on voice, poetry, and performance, the text returns to its original condition as a sounding body and shared gesture, connecting ancient memory with contemporary perception.

He has collaborated with poets including Gabriele Frasca, Giorgiomaria Cornelio, and Patrizia Valduga, developing works in which word, sound, electronics, and space create new forms of listening.

This line of research includes the radio programme Plurifonie for Usmaradio, dedicated to the history of voice and vocality, as well as his teaching activities at Malagola – Scuola di vocalità e centro studi internazionale sulla voce (Ravenna).

In 1987, at the invitation of the musicologist Israel Adler, he founded the RPD Klezmer Orchestra in Jerusalem, the first Italian ensemble devoted to klezmer music. The group’s activity introduced the term klezmer to Italy for the first time, making a significant contribution to the understanding and dissemination of this musical tradition in the country.

The relationship between image, sound, and time also informs his work in cinema. His audiovisual works arise from an understanding of editing as composition: images, archives, landscapes, and sonic materials are organised as elements of a perceptual writing in which the visible and the invisible enter into dialogue.

His works have been presented throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas at international festivals, theatres, museums, and biennials including Power Station of Art Shanghai, Ars Electronica Linz, Wien Modern, Inventionen Berlin, Sonambiente Berlin, Steirischer Herbst, Musikprotokoll Graz, Triennale Milano, Biennale di Venezia, Fundació Joan Miró Barcelona, Quadriennale di Roma, SUD – Salon Urbain de Douala, and Wiener Staatsoper.

He has received the Premio Napoli per la lingua e la cultura italiana and a fellowship from the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD. He is a member of the Internationale Heiner Müller Gesellschaft in Berlin and of the British Cartographic Society in London.

As an expert for the European Commission in the fields of art, science, and technology, he collaborates with the New European Bauhaus. At the invitation of the SciArt group of the JRC – Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, he wrote and illustrated eBAU. Art Dreams for the New European Bauhaus (Quodlibet, 2024).

Since 2025 he has been developing projects in Yerevan, in collaboration with hosq Foundation, focusing on the relationship between cultural heritage, memory, archives, and digital culture.

His albums include Japanese Girls at the Harbor, 1915. The Armenian Files, Ye Shanghai, and The Maya Effect. He is the artistic director of TACTUS Radio Festival and BIOMA, a festival dedicated to radical music.

His publications include PNEUMA. Giardini Pensili: un paesaggio sonoro (Comune di Monfalcone, 2005), Ombre (Quodlibet, 2019), Filmnero (Marsèll, 2011), Millesuoni. Deleuze, Guattari e la musica elettronica (with Emanuele Quinz, Cronopio, 2005), and Velvet. Rock Club Rimini (with Lucia Chiavari, NFC, 2026).

Born in Rimini and raised in Tremosine sul Garda, he has lived in Berlin, Naples, and Rome, and has spent extended periods working and conducting research in Vancouver, Shanghai, and Vienna, gradually developing an international practice through productions, residencies, and collaborations across a wide range of cultural contexts.

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