Marco Donnarumma

Lestes is an ongoing project that started in 2025. Here the first iteration of the work, Lestes MK1, is described. A second iteration is currently in development and more information will be shared in the coming months.

Same-day delivery; just-in-time computing; instagrammable art; attention span; AI assistants. In the global north, life and work have converged around an obsession with immediacy – a techno-fascist paradigm where a rhetoric of speed, optimization, and measurable output flattens affective experience, devalues interpersonal contact, and fuels extractive platforms. Lestes MK1 invites audiences to slow down and immerse themselves in the messy feeling of intimately sensing another body; an experience of intercorporeal vulnerability.

Lestes MK1 is a sound installation for a gallery space that functions in two modalities: as a standalone interactive work open to public fruition; as a living installation activated by a performer at given times for brief, one-on-one performances.

The artwork’s centrepieces are 3 biomechanical ‘organs’ resting on plinths. The organs leverage biomechanical aspects of human anatomy to transmit sound through the viscera, rather than the ears. Their form – tentacular, bone-like and cyber-organic – conjures up an ancient otherworldly body part, a symbol of a yet-unimagined form of embodiment. As a visitor picks up an organ and holds it against their bodies, this envelops their chest and neck by means of tentacles that spread onto embedded acoustic transducers. The organ’s contact with the body blurs the line between symbiosis and parasitism.

In standalone mode, a custom AI trained on the artist’s heartbeat, respiration and blood flow, generates a sound composition that the organs diffuse inside the visitors’ bodies. Visitors do not hear the sound, but perceive it internally; sound is multidimensional, and spread within the body by means of bone conduction, haptics, and resonances of the body’s internal flesh tissues. In a somatic experience that is magical and uncanny at the same time, their bodies become amplifiers.

During an activation, visitors encounter a masked performer sitting among the plinths. The performer embodies a strange creature, donning a ceremonial, eyeless mask with features similar to those of the organs, and wearing an electronic circuit, a biosensor, on its heart. The creature invites visitors to approach and touch its hands. As their fingers touch, the organ start transmitting to the visitor’s body live sounds from the creature body.

The creature’s heartbeat, blood flow and respiration sounds, flow into the visitor’s through the organs. As this sonic interchange happens, the subtle hands contact unfolds into a micro-choreography of closeness; the creature and the visitor communicate through caresses and gentle touches, developing their own form of language. As the interaction unravels the visitor and the creature’s bodies merge in a poetic suspension.

Lestes is part of the series I Am Your Body (2022-present), a project investigating deafness, sound, and (artificial) intelligence through participatory research driven by d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people.