Riccardo Santalucia is an Italian, Rotterdam-based artist working across sound, moving image, and interactive media. Trained first in Italy as a sound and interactive designer, he later completed an MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute. Their practice brings together physical and digital cultures in hybrid scenarios that probe emotion, social behaviour, and the friction between roles, systems, and rules. As part of their artistic inquiry, they are speculating about the philosophy of computational images and the politics of care, with which they advocate for rule-breaking (and re-making) methodologies in face of stereotyped and preset-like narratives.
Alongside their film and installation work, and the organization of art and music events, they are performing electro-acoustic music and audiovisual performances, live resampling a flugelhorn with custom-made softwares. Their music is influenced by improvisational and durational excercises at first discovered with composer Walter Prati and carried out within various groups of musicians throughout the years. Inspired by their training in Indian Drhupad singing with Janneke van der Putten, their affiliation with political and performative italian art collectives, their research in Indonesian noise and experimental music, and their emotional research into sound sculpting with algorithms, Santalucia research blurs the borders between music genres, embodied experiences and conceptual frameworks.
Emami Art Experimental Film Festival
Screening of the short film 'Unruly, Undead, Un Un: a place safe from all of this chaos'
Buiten Kasteel - Multiplayer Concert
The Multiplayer Concert is an audiovisual performance by the electroacoustic quartet Buiten Kasteel, comprising interactive visuals drawn by the audience using smartphones as canvas. Alongside playing live music, I curated the visual aesthetics repurposing the glow and bloom effects of the Call of Duty first-person-shooter franchise to turn the audience's drawings into animated light effects.
Tiny Tuin #9
Voor deze negende editie van Tiny Tuin heb ik een avond met podiumkunsten samengesteld, voorafgegaan door een gezamenlijk diner. Ik beschouwde mijn inzet voor het organiseren van deze reeks als een vorm van sociale kunst: het onderhouden van een netwerk van samenwerkingen, het organiseren van het evenement en het mogelijk maken van de uitvoering van de visie van de gastkunstenaars.
[untitle games event]
Installation of two independent screens with the short film 'Unruly, Undead, Un Un: a place safe from all of this chaos' runningin loop over the course of afternoon, followed by a presentation exploring the film themes and production process.
Fourier Transforms
The event hosted writing exercises, where participants where invited to adopt the perspective of fictional characters reminescent of an oracle, a future seeker or a fortune teller, while in dialogue with a multi-channel video work — digital animation techniques and analog footage — reflecting on algorithmic divination and pattern pareidolia through.
Milan Machinima Festival MMXXVI: REPLAY/RELOAD/RESPAWN
Ranging from 2 to 86 minutes, the 33 works selected for the Milan Machinima Festival MMXXVI (March 16—22 2026) represent the cutting edge of avant-garde machinima and game engine cinema, featuring emerging talents as well as renowned artists and filmmakers from all over the world.
The festival screened 'Unruly, Undead, Un Un: a place safe from all of this chaos' during the Another End of the World Is Possible programme.
The Cozy Pillow
During this workshop I guided participants in the crafting of pillows using the hand crochet technique (no hooks involved). The workshop ended with a session of music listening, carried out by seating on the pillows just made. Part of the pillows were donated to the hosting venue, Varia, for it to have a hand-made set of floor seatings that can be used during future music events. That same night, I performed music with live visuals inspired by the action of weaving together yarns.
Squaring the Circle
During the collective exhibition Squaring the Circle at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media and WORM Ubik, 'Unruly, Undead, Un Un: a place safe from all of this chaos' was presented as a single-channel video installation within an environment of light and fabric. By reimagining RGB lighting typically found in gaming setups, the work created an immersive ground-level cinema experience.