Rituals Around the Machines – R.A.M. Drop City 2022

In 2022, Rashid Uri was invited to collaborate with the HPO collective and Bill Kouligas on the creation of RAM, a performative installation, hosted in a 350m tunnel under the tracks of Milan Central Station, which focuses on the act of shredding materials as a sound and musical source. a bodily analogy of this reel magnetism: tunnel 40 becomes an underground stage inhabited not by sophisticated robots, but by raw and noisy shredders. The machines are activated at specific times of the week, to shred the waste materials collected during the cleaning of another fourteen railway tunnels before the Fuorisalone. These materials are divided, shredded, archived and catalogued for the subsequent phases of the recycling chain. In an attempt to open up new possibilities for the life cycles of matter, the machines use all available recycled material, “swallowing/cutting/digesting” the DiSPAssembly Park installation by @nike visible in tunnel 42 at the end of MDW - giving it both a new physical function and a new symbolic value. In line with the fundamental principles of iSPA (Improve, Scavenge, Protect, Adapt), iSPA collaborates with RAM: the demolition of DiSPAssembly Park will be re-elaborated into a "disassembly" soundscape composed by Bill Kouligas. The performative destruction is thus enacted by mechanisms and human bodies under the same underground vault.