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 installation linking the volatility of global financial markets with lived experiences of migration, precarity, and endurance. First created for documenta 14 in Athens, the work juxtaposes real-time stock market data with an ancient Greek lament, opening a stark dialogue between the abstractions of global capitalism and the realities of human suffering.

At the center of the installation, an LED ticker streams unaltered data from stock exchanges around the world. This relentless flow of numbers is slowed and synchronized to the rhythm of Αλησμονώ και χαίρομαι (When I Forget, I’m Glad), performed by the Pleiades Vocal Group. A ξενιτιά (migration) lament from the Epirus region, the song speaks to the pain of departure, separation from home, and the emotional toll of migration on families left behind.

Through poetic images of memory and loss, the lament articulates a fragile tension between forgetting as survival and remembering as sorrow, an ancient register that resonates uncannily with contemporary crises of displacement, conflict, and economic instability. By placing financial data and ancestral song side by side, The Way Earthly Things Are Going transforms the exhibition space into a site of reflection, inviting viewers to consider how global financial systems shape human destinies, and how resilience emerges as a shared, though unevenly distributed, condition of survival.

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