Instrumental (2023) Site-specific sound installation at Buranakit Rice Mill, Suphanburi, Thailand

Over a decade ago, I was fortunate to witness this rice mill while it was still in operation. The machines were alive, synchronized as part of a system that sustained rural life. Today, the mill has ceased functioning. Its machines have been dismantled, left to rust and scatter fragments of metal marking the end of a once-living organism.

In Instrumental, I collect these remnants old parts and rusted components of the original machinery and bring them back into action, not as machines, but as instruments of sound. The work consists of three custom-made musical devices, each assembled from different machine parts. Together, they produce looping mechanical rhythms and echoing tonalities through the physical resonance of the materials themselves.

These sounds are not merely mechanical they are, to me, the echoes of spirit. I believe that any object, once used and handled by human hands over time, accumulates something intangible something that lingers within its material body. In this piece, that presence is reawakened through sound. Instrumental is a site-specific installation created and presented at Buranakit Rice Mill in Suphanburi Province the very place from which every material in this work was sourced. It is both an act of remembrance and a celebration of what once was, and of what may yet become through rhythms that loop, shimmer, and reverberate across time.