Past Continuous was a sound based installation, which I put up at the end of my residency at Citadellarte Foundazione Pistoletto. Biella, historically as an industrial town, has been one of the earliest and finest processor of wool with some of its early industries dating back two centuries. Almost every other Biellese works in these textile industries. Doing a sound installation was in a way an excuse and an opportunity; a means of discovering the town and the life of the workers in the textile factories around Biella. I visited a number of abandoned and working textile factories and recorded sound samples of various spaces inside and outside them. These spaces ranged from decades-old desolate workshops to state-of-the-art automated ones. It was this play between the past and the present, the old and new and inhabited vs. abandoned that I set out to explore thorough sound, amid the past and the continuous life in quiet Biella.
Four seperate channels of sound were used. Each channel was thematically dedicated to the river, the machinery, my movements in these spaces and the electric hum from the industry power generators. These individual themes were played on four separate speakers placed at different locations within the installation. The channels were mixed using the structure itself, acting as an aural mixer for the individual themes. Depending on one's proximity to one of the four sound sources, one could hear more of one and less of the other channels. To me, this was an act of fragmenting my aural sense and then putting it back together as a soundscape for others to experience through this installation.
