Dario creates and facilitates solo and collaborative art projects and programs working across borders, art forms and models of creation.
He has particular interest in transnational social artworks that transcend language and nationhood yet address and encourage cultural difference. As an artist and director/curator/producer, he seeks to achieve multi-platform projects ‚ bringing together many artists and non-artists in the creation of aesthetically rich and politically charged interdisciplinary artworks.
In 2001 after touring with the Melbourne based internationally renowned company 5 Angry Men, Dario set out on a trajectory to challenge the status quo within the arts establishment. Combining participation, performance, visual art, architecture and new media, his mission was to create powerful works that could be as loved by the wider community as competitive sport.
Establishing Well Theatre in 2002 (now Well) to facilitate his vision to create new works of grand scale in open and non-traditional spaces. The SPART events were the first of many experiments to evolve a practice that incorporated multiple art-forms and audience collaboration.
From this emerged the Great Wall of Books (a globally collaborative and inter-generative artwork). Launched during Big West Festival 2005. Involving artworks created by a multitude of professional artists and non-artists from Melbourne’s West, whom Vacirca and a small team worked with over a long-term. The Book was installed for a week in the Footscray City Mall, inspiring and challenging the thousands who came into contact with it. Immediately snapped up by the City of Melbourne and a three-month engagement in Macau, SAR China ‚ the Book of Changes.
Since 2007 the Book has had three further large-scale international engagements and is still being made offers (the most recent from Mexico and Boston), each iteration of the Book is site and context specific, essentially becoming a multi-art festival of curated content and happenstance interactions.
During this period Vacirca also directed TOYS ‚ a large scale public space dance work in six locations simultaneously around the globe and the On Eye open-air dance and video series plus was artist in residence in Belgium and Wadeye and was in the inaugural artist’s group for Splendid Arts Lab.
In the first decade of the 2000’s Dario also worked with spectacle performance outfits ‚Snuff Puppets and Odd Productions, and cross art form company Aphids.
From 2012 to 2015 Dario was the Artistic Director of Open Space, guiding the company through large commissions and a major stage of transition, evolving the company to its new model and broadening its scope, to become a leading voice in contemporary community arts in SA.
Vacirca is a member of IETM (Europe) and has been a board member of Living Museum of the West and panel member with Arts Victoria, Carclew Youth Arts and the Independent Makers and Producers Panel for Arts SA.
Dario is the recipient of many commissions and grants and amongst many works and duties is currently in creative development of La Vita Nuova, an epic video art opera, collaborating with artists and non-artists of Sicilian descent. This project is seeing Dario writing and performing again – his original artforms, overshadowed in the last decade by the immensity of producing and directing works of scale.
