Project: Hestia e Larsen — Pietro Lugaro's website

Larsen – trying to dig a decent grave and Hestia are two interconnected artistic and research-based projects developed across two adjacent residencies between late 2022 and early 2023. The first took place in Genoa under the curatorial framework of MIXTA at Schoen Gallery, while the second was developed in Leipzig at Garage OST, in close collaboration with Luca Conte (aka Gerolamore). Conceived as parallel yet interdependent inquiries, the projects investigate sound, domesticity, and material culture as sites of resistance, mourning, and continuity.

Larsen centers on the concept of echo and sonic resistance through the performative and installative use of acoustic feedback. Treating the Larsen effect not as a technical malfunction but as an operative gesture, the project explores feedback as a form of sonic excavation, a sustained act of digging through sound. The work emerged in response to the death of the so-called “Man of the Holes”, the last surviving member of an uncontacted Indigenous tribe in Brazil, whose isolation and eventual disappearance exposed the asymmetry between mediated observation and lived existence. His death, legible only to an external, media-saturated gaze, becomes a trigger for reflecting on invisibility, extinction, and the violence embedded in regimes of visibility.

This reflection intersects with Pasolini’s writings on the disappearance of peasant culture and pre-consumer forms of life. In response, the project incorporates hand-made lace cloths and blankets produced by elderly inhabitants of Genoa, positioning them as material witnesses to a generation born before global consumer culture.

Hestia extends this inquiry by addressing questions of domestic ritual and collective memory. Developed in Leipzig, the project reconstructs the symbolic figure of the hearth through the building of a bread oven, constructed using ancient techniques and exclusively natural, freely gathered materials. Parallel to this, Larsen evolved into the development of a wearable microphone system, creating a feedback network that amplifies the sound and resonance of the active oven back into the space.

Together, the projects form an unfinished requiem: a joint mourning for disappearing forms of life, knowledge, and communal practice, held open as an ongoing process awaiting further activation.

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