The Interruption of Oblivion

In The Interruption of Oblivion, Luca Bermejo revives what the system has sentenced to death: technological bodies rendered obsolete by planned obsolescence. Fifteen discarded printers, salvaged from scrap yards, warehouses, and institutions, are reprogrammed to become sound generators, an orchestra born from electronic waste. Through this machinic ensemble, Bermejo confronts us with the detritus of hypermodern life and asks: what happens when silence is forced upon systems meant only to produce?

Drawing from thinkers like Michel Chion and Franco "Bifo" Berardi, the work explores how overload, of information, of consumption, of productivity, fractures empathy and cognition. The soundscape created by these repurposed machines simulates the saturation we live in: a constant buzz of noise, data, and distraction. Then, through moments of intentional silence, Bermejo interrupts the cycle, allowing a fleeting possibility of awareness, perhaps even mourning.

The project acts as a critique of our extractive relationship with time, labor, and material. Like the human body under capitalism, these machines are used until they no longer serve, then replaced without ceremony. Yet here, they are granted new purpose, made audible and visible in their decay. Through recycled metal frames and reused ink and paper, even the infrastructure of the installation resists the logic of disposability.

Incorporating cut-up techniques inspired by William S. Burroughs, Bermejo reassembles fragments of sound, text, and data, not to create coherence, but to reveal the illegibility produced by excess. As printers repeatedly stamp environmental and economic statistics onto the same recycled pages, legibility is lost in layers of ink, just as meaning is drowned in the endless feed of capitalist acceleration.

The Interruption of Oblivion is not a requiem but a rupture,a sonic and material space where the forgotten speaks, where silence becomes a form of resistance, and where discarded machines vibrate with the echo of what we choose not to hear.