HERMENEUTS (1965)

Within the vast project of the Fantastic City, where every environment was conceived as a space of sensory immersion capable of transforming everyday perception, Fogliati developed a series of sound‑producing devices united by a fundamental principle: to receive the external world — noise, air, water — and return it as an aesthetic experience, as renewed listening. The Ermeneuti, the Latomie, and the Liquimofono all belong to this same lineage: sculptural instruments that translate physical phenomena into vibrations, gurgles, and resonances, giving voice to what normally remains indistinct or silent.

The Ermeneuti are alpacca tubes with carefully calibrated forms, designed to transform urban chaos into a continuous and ever‑changing sonic flow. Suspended at a precise height, they act as resonators sensitive to specific frequencies: true instruments of listening, capable of converting the city’s acoustic disorder into a new perceptual event, almost meditative. Fogliati created variants in different materials, shapes, and sizes, refining their response to external stimuli. Held to the ears, they reveal their nature as sound filters, allowing one to experience the acoustic transformation envisioned by the artist.

LATOMIE (1965)

The Latomie, also curved tubes but resting on the ground and partially filled with water, introduce an additional element: liquid matter as a generator of sound. A compressor injects air into the tubes, and the interplay between form, liquid, and the amount of air produces gurgles, irregular rhythms, and sonorities that resemble a deep breath, as if the water were finally finding a voice. Each Latomia is a small acoustic cavity, an organism that lives through a balance of pressure, vibration, and fluidity.

LIQUIMOPHONE(1965)

The Liquimofono takes this research to a more articulated level: a kind of water organ composed of three curved alpacca tubes, soldered with tin and filled with different fluids. Here too, a compressor introduces air, but the presence of three distinct forms — high, medium, and low — allows for a true orchestration of liquid sonorities. The use of different fluids, from water to glycerin, from light oil to heavy oil, further expands the timbral range, transforming the Liquimofono into a laboratory of fluid harmonies, conceived for the sonification of lakes and rivers: a way of giving voice to natural elements through vibrations and resonances.

In all these works, Fogliati does not seek merely to produce sound: he seeks to produce listening. The Ermeneuti, the Latomie, and the Liquimofono are devices that transform physical phenomena — urban noise, the movement of liquids — into aesthetic experiences capable of softening the world’s chaos and returning it to the imagination.