Life in the Hive: Franco Leprino’s ‘Integrati… Disintegrati’

Reviews / June 30, 2026 Integrati… Disintegrati Franco Leprino Eleven, 1977 The work of someone called “McPanda,” who seems to have evaporated after the LP’s release, the front cover art of Franco Leprino’s 1977 Integrati… Disintegrati (“Integrated… Disintegrated,” as you’ve doubtless worked out for yourselves) shows the hexagonal cells of what looks like a honeycomb, an artifact that connotes naturalness but also evokes the same queasy blend of the biological and the mechanical that H.R. Giger made his leitmotif. It’s queasy because of the way it calls into question whether the way we live, the things we make, and the stuff we do are actually an expression of our individual personalities and temperaments, or simply the result of our organic machinery acting out its biological imperatives: the only difference between us and the bees being that, by some quirk of evolution, we think we’re the ones running the program, as opposed to being the program’s genetically-triggered executors.…