My work is a constant attempt of contact and dialogue with the consciousness of the Earth and the social context.

The shapeshifter project and series of works draw inspiration from the shamanic practices of Central America. where the "curanderi" are capable of changing shape by camouflaging themselves with the surrounding environment.

In this way I achieve performances that I obtain by portraying myself in a specific sensitive place, that is, that I feel particularly in a sort of active contemplation, thus seeking dialogue and contact with the genius loci.

This context, which produces in me a feeling, a sort of instance of inner truth, gives interaction a performative character, unique in its type, where spectators and participants are nature and the camera.

What happens to the place and to the perception of it when I am present in that space as well as when I am absent from it is very interesting.

The two realities witnessed overlap in the digital editing phase, a natural continuation of the performative process. All this carries in itself an unpredictable and intuitive character that does not allow any iterative and mechanical methodology, but a continuous aesthetic and technical reinvention.

The final result then becomes not only a documentary work, an action that develops further in the immaterial world of the bit.

There, in fact, the manipulation of matter is possible, there by its very nature every action becomes an aesthetic and performative process of contact and reinvention of reality.

So my performance is digital because technology plays a key role and not ancillary instrumentally, as the content, technique, aesthetics and even the transmission of my work are entrusted to technology.

My artistic practice compared to the innovative practices of artists ranging from Stelarc, to Blast Theory to Eduardo Kac, arises in a research not so much of avatars, digital doubles or extra-temporal illusions, but of an investigation of our relationship with the world and the extension of the aesthetic action in time and space through technology.

 

The shapeshifter collection of the artist salvatore calì dares to propose at the same time an artistic vision and a vision of life, time and transformation: life as a visionary and biological exercise, and nature that becomes a partner in artistic expression.
calì's choice to connect to earth, rocks and trees coincides with its detachment from the western tradition where nature is mainly a positive object of investigation to generate instead a dynamic project of dialogue with nature which is also performative contemplation. calì thus opens the artistic discourse to new realizations.
calì created the notion of "digital performance" in which the artist produces artistic actions imbued with sacredness in interaction with various environments. His actions, in agreement and respect for nature, are his performance, digitally recorded with film and photography.
stelarc, robert lepage, merce cunningham, laurie anderson, blast theory, eduardo kac have all paved the way for digital performance, but it acquires a radically different dimension and expression.

(Renata Summo O'Conell curator of the Artegiro project)

 

The belief that there is an energetic bond that tightens the human body and the environmental context in an inextricable union is the basis of much of Salvatore Calì's work, in which the body (his) loses boundaries and is dispersed in nature, "covering" human skin waterfalls, trees, places propelling an ancestral energy ...

(from the catalog presentation by Marco Trulli for the personal Shapeshifters, in the context of timeless | timeless, curatorial project by Renata Summo O'Connell - Artegiro Contemporary Art, Montefiascone (Viterbo), 2012)

 

Salvatore Calì is artistically attracted to the natural world, he presents it in photography with shrubs, tree branches, rocks and leaves that surround it. These elements interpenetrate with the artist to achieve a symbiosis between nature and the human body. The photographic work derived from these compositions is very suggestive and the philosophical meanings expressed, make us remember the German Romanticist painter David Friedrich, lover of the inner spirit and the regenerative force of nature.
These works presented at the Art Web Gallery are not improvisations or random experiments in photography, but works of visual art, designed and created with a language that can be traced back to the context of contemporary art.

Gilda Da Pozzo (from Art & Photography 2013 Online Review | Art Web Gallery )