Respiro八Tribute – “All that is straight lies“
Photo: © NO PANIC Agency
Respiro八Tribute is an immersive exhibition unfolding across three self-contained yet interconnected spaces, exploring the themes of memory, data perception and the sharing of rituals. It was created for the 2026 edition of Green&Blue, the festival that the newspaper La Repubblica dedicates every year to environmental sustainability.
Respiro八Tribute – The exhibition
Respiro八Tribute is Oriana Persico’s first solo, autobiographical exhibition, curated by Michela Santoro, marking her first public statement after the silence and held breath of mourning. It ran from 4 to 6 June 2026 in the halls of MUST, the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, in dialogue with the focus of the Festival’s 2026 edition, NOI (“We”), chosen by artistic director Federico Ferrazza. The exhibition was also the occasion for the world premiere of pneumOS_XS, the new urban, compact and easily transportable version of pneumOS.
… After almost four years, I return to communicating, to share a palpable, tangible experience.
Crossing the Crisis and returning to Breathe.
Held together by the most powerful antidote to the violence of calculation, of war, of extraction.
By the greatest, most intimate revolution I have ever known.
In this story that goes on, where the red of blood turns to pink,
Death and Life, Held Breath and Breath coincide in a single movement: Love.
Photo: © NO PANIC Agency
Exhibition design
Conceived as a single narrative device, the exhibition connects three experiences that respond to three distinct yet complementary functions: at its centre, the Carousel of Time gathers the memory of four years of life. On either side, the work pneumOS_XS awakens sensitivity to data, while, as its mirror image, the performance pneumOS Senbazuru activates a collective ritual. The visual impact plays on colour pink for the pneumOS_XS area and mint green for the Senbazuru area.
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Photo: © NO PANIC Agency
The Carousel of Time – The “WE” of the Process
The Carousel of Time is made up of two circular timelines that unfold around an octagonal column, interweaving the artist’s biography with the genesis of the artwork pneumOS.
Visitors enter through a curtain of fringe marking its perimeter. The path can be walked in either direction, with no obligatory beginning or end.
The space is divided into wedges of colour shifting from red-black — associated with the Held Breath of 2022, the year Salvatore Iaconesi died — to the pale pink of the Breath of 2026.
At these two extremes, two structures inspired by Torii, the gateways of Japanese Shinto tradition, gather objects belonging to the artist or linked to the development of pneumOS (materials, prototypes, garments): genuine “relics” of four years of personal history.
Some of these relics reappear in the photographs mounted on the column, creating a direct correspondence between the original object and its pictorial account.
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pneumOS_XS – WE and Data
pneumOS_XS is the compact, transportable version of pneumOS, the artwork created in 2022 for the city of Ravenna that represented Italy at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan.
pneumOS_XS is designed as a design object, somewhere between a domestic lamp and a smart system for public lighting and sound diffusion. It comes alive in real time with air-quality data, translating invisible environmental information into movement, light and sound that the public can perceive.
Eight poufs arranged around it invite visitors to sit, observe it up close and empathise with its breath. Eight small spherical speakers, connected to the work by a cable, can be brought up to the ear for a closer perception of the sound generated by air-quality data. During the Green&Blue Festival it was powered by ARPA Lombardia data, reproducing the breath of Milan.
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Photo: © NO PANIC Agency
PneumOS Senbazuru – WE and the Planet
On the opposite side of the space, pneumOS Senbazuru reworks the ancient Japanese practice of the garland of a thousand origami cranes, made to wish for luck and healing, together with the gesture of Sadako Sasaki, the girl who survived the bombing of Hiroshima, fell ill with leukaemia, and began her own Senbazuru wishing for a world free of nuclear conflict.
Eight cushions arranged in a circle on a rug mark out the performance area.
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Photo: © NO PANIC Agency
About Angel F
Angel_F (Autonomous Non Generative E-volitive Life Form) is how, in 2006, Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico became a couple, an artistic duo and a cyberqueer family: a work-performance that, twenty years on, sheds new light on how we might imagine and build our relationship with AI and technology. The biodoll is the digital identity created by artist Franca Formenti in 2002.
Each paper sheet carries a piece of content on the environment and technology, drawn from the Green&Blue archive or from the AOS Archive of the Persico/Iaconesi duo (Angel F, Nuclear Anxiety). Once a crane is completed, visitors can write a wish for the planet on a card recalling ema, the votive tablets of Japanese temples, to be hung on a wooden structure that collects them. The cranes, gathered into a garland resembling a design lamp, gradually form a choral work dedicated to the breath of the planet.
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Photo: © NO PANIC Agency
Datapoietic cosmogony
Respiro八Tribute presents, for the first time, the Datapoietic Cosmogony panel, which reconstructs, in the form of a concept map, the entire genealogy of Datapoiesis: from the origins of the concept to the works that followed it.
“In the beginning was Eros, in the beginning was AOS/Art is Open Source”: the map’s opening line recalls Hesiod’s Theogony, where Eros is one of the primordial forces of the cosmos. In the life and work of Oriana Persico and Salvatore Iaconesi, Eros is the same generative force that set everything in motion: the couple, the research, the works, the idea of a new model of living and of a new season for Italian design.
DATAPOIESIS: Concept and works in brief
Datapoietics is the artistic practice that unites data and poiesis. The term “Datapoiesis” was coined by Oriana Persico and Salvatore Iaconesi in 2018 to describe a new phase of their artistic project, and refers to data’s capacity to create something that did not exist before, making us sensitive to the complex phenomena of our environment.
Through the datapoietic approach, data and computation leave the exclusive domain of technique and embrace that of sensitivity, meaning, relationship and culture. What emerges is an aesthetics (and an ethics) of relationship, in which the artwork becomes a “totem of knowledge”: a device conceived to help people learn to gather around data, to imagine new social roles and new rituals, and to feel again — generating meaning together.
The first datapoietic work is OBIETTIVO (2019): the lamp animated by global poverty data entered the Farnesina Collection in 2020 and the ADI Index, competing for the Compasso d’Oro. The second, Udatinos (2021), was created in Palermo at the Ecomuseo Urbano Mare Memoria Viva and later shown in Verona (2025): the work is an artificial plant that gives voice to the wellbeing of water. pneumOS, “the cybernetic organ” that breathes with the city, made its Milan debut in a compact, transportable version for the Green&Blue 2026 edition, following Expo Osaka 2025.
Japanese imagery
Graphic Design
RESPIRO八TRIBUTE CREW
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Noemi De Luca and Luca Russo animated the Senbazuru performance space. She, a playwright and journalist, oversees the writing and organisation of independent artistic projects. Luca Russo, with a background in architecture and computation, develops research on space, body and sound starting from corporeal mime.
Other protagonists who played an equally significant, if different, role in the exhibition: Luca Befera, a researcher at the University of Turin, studies the application of multimedia technologies and artificial intelligence to cultural heritage and generative art. Agnese Romanò works on new technologies for art: together, the two supported the creative process, documenting its results.
Daniela Calisi (The Paper Lab, Salotto di Miranda) investigates the construction of writing and reading interfaces as collective infrastructures, designing devices through which communities can tell their own stories; she is currently developing a non-generative, local neighbourhood artificial intelligence, conceived as a civic algorithm.
Stefano Colarelli (Educational.City, Schola Fabra), co-producer with HER, represents the point of connection with the world of schools and educational services.
RESPIRO八TRIBUTE DIALOGUES
The space of Respiro八Tribute was visited by many of the Festival’s speakers, among them Maura Gancitano (philosopher, writer, co-founder of Tlon) and Andrea Pezzi (entrepreneur and digital innovator), with whom dialogues on shared themes are currently underway.
About Respiro八Tribute
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PRESS
Read what the press wrote about Respiro八Tribute.
Bring the exhibition to your space!
Full version
All three spaces together (Carousel of Time, pneumOS_XS, Senbazuru)
Focus on pneumOS_XS
pneumOS_XS as a stand-alone, transportable installation (squares, hotels, museums, gardens, airports).
Focus on the autobiographical narrative
The Carousel of Time in different versions, from the full installation to a pop-up book edition.
Focus on the ritual
The Senbazuru is a participatory performance that can be activated in any space, with or without the other works, adaptable to the message one wishes to convey.
Merchandising
Prints, origami kits, planners, publications and other materials drawn from the exhibition’s imagery.
Host Respiro八Tribute!
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CREDITS
Respiro八Tribute was promoted by Green&Blue 2026 edition. Special thanks to art director Federico Ferrazza, Head of Marketing and Events Alberto Ibba, and science journalist Sandro Iannaccone.
produced by HER she Loves Data research center.
Scientific and technological partners
Educational.city; Hi-storia; Schola Fabra
