Fictitious Fixture (2023)

Installation by Shaahin Peymani and Maryam Katan

The Tr********r CLEANOMAT CL-C3 cotton cleaner No. 097 ** *6 was shipped from Germany to Iran in August 2009. It was assembled as the last part of a Cotton spinning line in the K**** S***** yarn production factory in the Isfahan province. The product of which would be exported back to Germany. However, the machine has been sitting there silent in the last14 years. The main reason being the impossibility of maintenance and spare parts not being able to travel from Germany to Iran. With this machine being one of the hundreds becoming obsolete, The inducing political, social or economical reasons should be also traced and reflected upon in the industrial soundscape. The increasing industrial noise due to disfunction or overwork, the decay towards abandoned silence, and eventually the overall soundscape.

Putting together recordings from the abandoned textile factory in Iran, and the actual spare parts from Germany which were supposed to end-up there, this installation tends to use the post-industrial listening/observation as a mean to explore “inter”-national relations and their social impacts beyond the commerce bargains.Through resonating frequencies of the soundscape, and re-purposing the obsolete mechanics, this fictitious recreation of a long delayed union questions fallacy in its intertwined levels.