The Way Earthly Things Are Going

Info

• Title : The Way Earthly Things Are Going

• Year : 2017

• Medium : Installation with multichannel sound, LED display, and real-time stock market data.

• Duration : Variable.

Details

The Way Earthly Things Are Going is an immersive sound and data installation that brings the volatility of global financial markets into relation with lived experiences of migration, separation and endurance. First created for documenta 14 in Athens, the work places the abstract language of global finance alongside an ancient musical tradition of lament, allowing two very different systems of value, memory and time to occupy the same space.

At the centre of the installation, an LED ticker continuously streams data from stock exchanges around the world. Numbers, currencies and market fluctuations move through the space in an unending flow, translating distant economic activity into a constantly changing visual presence. Against this numerical language is Αλησμονώ και χαίρομαι (When I Forget, I’m Glad), performed by the Pleiades Vocal Group.

The song belongs to the tradition of xenitia – Greek songs of migration and exile associated particularly with the region of Epirus. These laments emerged from histories of departure, expressing the emotional consequences of leaving home and the separation experienced by those who migrate as well as those who remain behind. In When I Forget, I’m Glad, forgetting offers a temporary release from sorrow, while remembering returns the singer to the pain of absence. Memory itself becomes suspended between consolation and suffering.

Within the installation, the human voice and the flow of financial information coexist without resolving into one another. The market operates through abstraction: people, resources, risk and value are translated into numbers that fluctuate continuously across global networks. The lament, by contrast, gives expression to the emotional and embodied consequences of movement – the distance between people, the fragility of belonging and the persistence of memory.

The work brings these contrasting temporalities into proximity. Financial markets respond within fractions of a second, while the lament carries a musical language transmitted across generations. One registers the world through constant change and calculation; the other through memory, repetition and collective experience. Yet both speak, in different ways, to uncertainty and to forces capable of reshaping individual lives.

Rather than proposing a direct equivalence between economic volatility and human suffering, The Way Earthly Things Are Going creates a space in which their entanglement can be considered. Migration, economic instability, conflict and displacement are experienced unevenly, while the systems influencing them often remain distant or invisible.

Financial data and lament unfold alongside one another throughout the installation, bringing two distinct ways of registering a changing world into proximity. Their relationship remains unresolved, shifting as continuously as the information passing through the space.

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