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In the opening part of the Instrumentarium cycle, Vitalina Louis Mahomedova turns attention to listening to what has not been heard before – the internal electromagnetic field, the silent flow of energy that once set the instrument in motion.

These frequencies – inaudible to the human ear – are collected using contact microphones and magnetic field sensors and converted into sounds.

Residual Sound rejects the division between the present and the future. It follows the rhythm of time described by philosopher John S. Mbiti, who wrote that according to many African worldviews, the future does not exist—time moves backwards, from the present to the past.

This installation is therefore not a futuristic concept, but a return: a backward movement through sound, uncovering what has always been present in the memory of the instrument.

It is an act of listening across time, not to what is to come, but to what lingers. It is a conversation with the machine’s own past, with the artists who used it before. The piano plays itself again, but now the piece is an echo of its electricity, a music of memory instead of an expansion forward.