Finding place: Fallowfield Loop, Manchester. Photo and visual editing: Klaus d Michel ©2026.
The machine was torched. A kill. A massacre.
Cut out and removed from its environment and floated against a sky. A sky blue that is not weather, it is the colour of held breath. Like the neutral sphere of an examination room, the institutional calm that says: look, that’s what is left, a pure, skeletal existence. The bare minimum, everything has been chemically transformed: metal oxidised, plastics vapourised, cushioning melted and paint burned to nothing.
The machine becomes a sculpture. A sculpture holding a posture almost animal and mechanical beast to the same degree. As if reared up at the moment of ignition and simply stayed there, frozen mid-motion, a horse held in mid-gallop. The whole body is suspended in an act of not-quite-falling.
Depicting it like this gives expression to my idea to transport a Machina Incensa (torched machine) into the hallowed space of a museum or gallery. Maybe mounted on a block of glass or synthetic resin. One day I will do just that. But for now this depiction serves as a manifestation of that idea.
This is one of three torched machines I’ve found and treated so far. In the next Machina Incensa instalment I will draw an art-historical line to Readymades like Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel from 1913 and another aesthetic connection to the kinetic sculptures of Jean Tinguely (mainly in the 1950/60s).
Machina Incensa III
Photographed at finding place before any visual treatment.