I work with sound, language, images and ordinary objects to make the distance between what is said and what is experienced perceptible.
A voice, a wall, a recorder, a repeated sentence. I build situations in which listening becomes a decision about attention, proximity and responsibility. Participation changes the work; the process remains visible.
Sound is often where my work begins and the medium through which it thinks. A recorded voice carries memory and authority; it can be displaced, translated or repeated until its meaning changes. I use these transformations to ask how an experience becomes a representation.
I am drawn to simple mechanisms whose effects are not simple. A button, a piano or a length of discarded wire can make a larger system visible. My installations respond to the acoustic, historical and social pressures of a place. I begin by listening before deciding what to introduce.
Participation is a compositional method. The people who enter a project change its structure and make authorship less stable. Across installation, performance, writing and teaching, I return to the same question: how can a work make us aware of the way a message is being produced?
Chronological order by the latest
documented year of each work.
21 works · 2008–2023
A heart-shaped button invites the visitor into a private listening experience through headphones. The public gesture and the sound heard by one person create a distance between promise, desire and perception.
Dates documented: 2003 / 2008. Work created in 2003; installation version documented in 2008.
Original drawings animated with Macromedia Flash 5. The work explores the relationship between image and technology; its now-obsolete digital format also raises questions of preservation.
Dates documented: 2006 / 2008.
The rules of a television format, translated into Latin, take the form of a liturgy. A portable record player broadcasts the ritual: entertainment, popularity and belief occupy the same space.
The portfolio dates this work to 2010; the exhibition record also includes a 2009 presentation.
A fan, a compressor and a drill encounter harmonicas, a flute and a music box. Machines and instruments from different countries search for an unstable balance, with their sound-producing mechanisms exposed.
202 volcanic stones, one for each inhabited home in the village, are connected with discarded wire. Their arrangement becomes a score, performed with recorded and pitched sounds of stone striking stone.
An homage to Alvin Lucier: successive recordings and playbacks transform both voice and image. The resonances of the room progressively take the place of the original material.
Children are asked which sound they would take with them to remember home. Recordings, drawings and short descriptions form a shared memory, later collected in a vinyl edition.
Small appliances connected to a portable machine build a field of noise. The duration of the action invites listeners to stay and discover their own music within a shared experience.
Screams recorded on rollercoasters are isolated and assembled into a continuous loop. Around a ceramic sculpture, sound separated from its origin unsettles the relationship between fear, pleasure and ritual.
Drawing generates a sound environment through an amplified table. Sheets removed during the action travel into another room: the visual trace and the noise are produced in the same gesture.
Three sentences of a confession are written on slate blackboards and immediately erased. The friction of chalk, recorded through the surface, continues to resonate: the words disappear while their acoustic trace remains.
More than sixty students write what they would like to tell adults and their city. Adult voices whisper their words behind the walls: listening requires approaching the architecture.
Second Prize, Installation, Sculpture & Performance, X Premio Celeste, PAN, Naples, 2013.
A shared reading inspired by Marinetti’s Radiophonic Syntheses. Each spectator becomes the interpreter of their own experience within a collective situation that multiplies the positions from which listening happens.
The form of a call to prayer meets the names of companies involved in rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan. Recovered objects and a rug construct a visual device designed to hold the listener’s attention.
The portfolio records development from 2010 to 2013. This entry documents the 2013 version.
A small monument to mediation: audio components and a symbolic structure disperse the message they are meant to transmit. Gary Sussman’s voice whispers the secret rules of the Pythagorean school.
Micro Monument in Tribute to Marshall McLuhan.
Five older women exercise while wearing instruments built for the occasion. Movement, effort and differences of rhythm generate an analog composition: the bodies produce the acoustic structure.
Stretching Analog Drone Orchestra. Development documented from 2013; performed in Vienna in 2014.
A portable listening device enters the former cell of a historic palace. The possibility of carrying an acoustic space encounters a place of confinement, between assistance, displacement and limitation.
A self-built mask-instrument transforms breath into sound through resistance. The self-portrait questions art’s capacity to communicate and the possibility that its own apparatus may obstruct expression.
Dates documented: 2016 / 2017. Video created in 2016; installation and performance developed in 2017. Preserved through the videoartYEARBOOK archive.
Air, rotating tubes and small sound-producing mechanisms move through Porta Savonarola. The installation connects the birds occupying the space, the memory of their trade and the figure of the phoenix.
Children and local residents build an acoustic portrait through exploration, interviews, recording and translation. Domestic memories, secrets and the highest points of a life come together in a shared installation.
March–April 2021. With Marco Tondello, Escola Samuntada pupils and other participants; vocal contribution by Lu Rois.
Two pianists share a keyboard. Fragments of six national anthems compete for space, interrupt each other and develop into a common structure. Musical negotiation becomes a physical act.
Dates documented: 2015–2023. Development documented in the dossier, 2015–2023. The 2023 version lasts approximately 30 minutes.
No works match this selection.
Artist’s books, poetry
and language as material.
A two-part artist’s book bringing the unfolding process of artistic research onto the page.
Body, travel, memory and emotional exposure. Vulnerability enters the writing as a way of perceiving.
A reflection on relationships with conversational artificial intelligence, emotional projection and the need for critical distance.
Nursery rhymes and tongue twisters connect English pronunciation, images and learning. Developed in Koh Dach during teaching in Cambodia.
Original images and poetry in dialogue with the iconographic traditions of tarot. A printed copy has been exhibited at the International Tarot Museum in Riola.
Dario Lazzaretto
Padua, 1975.
Based in Cambodia.
I am an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator. My practice moves through sound, installation, performance, video, printed matter and collaborative processes.
Working with children, students, older participants and local communities, I construct situations in which listening and translation become shared research. Teaching is where that research becomes testable by others.
Download selected CV ↓ PDFEnglish · 2026
Audio Art teaching within the curatorial course at A+A Gallery, Venice. Cultural work for Progetto Giovani, Municipality of Padua, through Spazi Padovani.
NES Artist Residency, Skagaströnd; Cornaro Institute / Cyprus College of Art, Larnaca.
AIR Studio, Paducah. School workshops in Metropolis and activities combining listening, drawing and translation across media.
DordtYart residency, Dordrecht. Second Prize in Installation, Sculpture & Performance at the X Premio Celeste, Naples, for Share a Secret.
Ruth Katzman Scholarship and residency at the Art Students League’s Vytlacil Campus. S.A.D.O. in Vienna; Clash or Plug workshop in Padua.
Hope Is a Project, Still: STEP-supported research travel. The planned workshop was not implemented; the stay became preliminary fieldwork.
BABEL — un diálogo abierto: residency, workshops and final installation at MediaEstruch / L’Estruch.
Publication of Nudo Sensibile. Humble Self-Portrait of a Sound Artist included in the videoartYEARBOOK anniversary selection at the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival.
English teaching and creative learning, intermittently over approximately five months, at AHHA International and other schools.