CONDYLURA09
w/LORENZO LUNGHI
2026
Edition of 100
20 pages
Broadsheet
supported by Nub
10 € BUY
Condylura publishes a free digital copy at sold-out
Claws, tail strikes, blows and whistles. Like a rodent sabotaging the exhibition apparatus, Vibrisse reconfigures the exhibition into a transmission system, animated by pneumatic movement: a single vibrating device, a decomposing organism, at once machine and animal. The photographic series published in the edition is an inseparable part of this broader project, which unfolds as a visual and live arts complex in constant evolution.
VIBRISSE︎
Live exhibition & release launch
TESTO
Claws, tail strikes, blows and whistles. Like a rodent sabotaging the exhibition apparatus, Vibrisse reconfigures the exhibition into a transmission system, animated by pneumatic movement. The space takes on the appearance of a subterranean complex, a burrow populated by organ debris, where pipes, valves and control boards are grafted into a sculptural circuit that claws the architecture. A single vibrating apparatus, a large decomposing organism, at once machine and animal.
The photographic series published in the edition is an inseparable part of this broader apparatus, which unfolds as a constantly evolving visual and performative complex encompassing the exhibition Vibrisse, the performance that inaugurates it, and the actions the artist carries out in reduced forms. From the very conception of the project, the possibility of further reshaping it—installational and performative—has been integral to it. Indeed, following its inaugurational launch at NUB Project Space in Pistoia, Vibrisse takes on a new configuration at Gelateria Sogni di Ghiaccio in Bologna.
This condition of in-becoming recurs throughout the work of Lorenzo Lunghi, whose practice investigates the technological object and the speculative horizon, at once folkloric and contemporary, associated with it and permeating its perception. There is a hidden, occult dimension running through the artist’s work, which reinterprets technology as an entity in its own right—one whose signs we can perceive, but whose presence in its entirety eludes us, like a crepuscular animal. Through a sculptural and live practice that evokes the territories of DIY and hacking—between self-production, reworking and sabotage—Lunghi diverts the technological device from its intended course, steering it towards conditions of anomaly. This presents technology as an instrument of control, both imposed and self-directed, and plays on the dialogical schizophrenias that emerge from such relationship: animal and machine, prosthesis and obstacle, device and paranoia, tool and alienation.
Compared to other of the artist’s projects, Vibrisse draws on imaginaries less explicitly connected to the society of control, rediscovering the familiar profile of the countryside and suburban landscape in which the artist grew up—from cornfields to the concrete infrastructures captured in the photographs. The underlying protagonist of the exhibition, and of its various remediations, is the coypu, a symbol of conspiracy and disobedience to the logic of the machine, informed by images of tractors sunk into the ground by the rodent’s subterranean excavations, buried components and gnawed circuits.
In Vibrisse, the fabric of the installation follows a hybrid rhythm, oscillating between linearity and distortion. It takes the form of an underground realm, within which we encounter three distinct works that nevertheless compose a single expanded instrument, stretched out across the space, condensing and merging elements of animality and technology. An organ-carcass suggesting that the rodent’s perspective might offer another way of reimagining the very use of the machine, parasitizing its original logic and creating new sensory forms, between breath and scent, attuned to a vibratory mode of communication.
The sculptural group Tin Whiskers takes its name from a microscopic metallurgical phenomenon, brought into the exhibition at the scale of the obsolete control boards of electropneumatic organ registers. The brass whiskers, shaken by the opening and closing of the valves, evoke the spontaneous filamentary protrusions that form on metal surfaces subjected to mechanical stress, causing short circuits and thus conjuring the idea of sabotage and malfunction. A mysterious phenomenon, discovered by telephone companies investigating the origins of damage to their infrastructure—another reference to the idea of the exhibition as an apparatus of transmission and communication. Clinging to the walls with brass claws, Fiati feeds both the acoustic horizon of the environment—half transmission antenna, half peripheral limb of the organ’s main body—and the image of a presence that parasitizes the space, leaving subdued traces in the process of inhabiting it. Vibrisse, the large organ that shares its name with the exhibition, extends its protrusions across the floor as though they were tunnels burrowed into the earth. The term refers to the stiff tactile hairs of felines and rodents: barely visible nervous systems that function like radars, sensing vibrations and movements and guiding orientation and communication through shadowy spaces.
We might imagine this instrument as having been built by coypus themselves in burrows beneath our feet, salvaging components from abandoned organs in provincial parish churches. Vibrisse is a large rodent that, through breath, percussion and pressure, evokes a deep exhalation, a conspiracy rising from underground: the miasma of a machine sunk into the earth, a funeral lament for the unknown rodent.