Arrigo Lora-Totino

Arrigo Lora-Totino (3 August 1928 in Torino – 15 September 2016 in Torino) is an important figure of Italian sound poetry.

Author of numerous essays on visual and sound poetry, Totino was a man of extreme inventiveness. He has developed the Idrornegafono, a rotating horn allowing a projection of the speaker's voice in a 360 degree circle; or the hydromegaphone used in a series of Liquid poems in which the voice is sounded through water.

Arrigo Lora-Totino is mostly known for having curated the anthology Various - Futura: Poesia Sonora, where he collected the voices of the most interesting sound poets of the twentieth century, but also for being a key figure in the Italian experimental poetry. Active since the late sixties, he gave more than 200 performances of gymnastic poetry and liquid poetry and a series of mimic declamations of avant-garde texts, from futurism to Dadaism, Russian Zaum, expressionism, surrealism, lettrisme and concretism.