This Too Shall Pass

Details

Presented simultaneously in different adaptations across Frankfurt in 2021 – including the River Main, the Römer Courtyard and Dreikönigskirche – This Too Shall Pass is a city-wide multichannel installation reflecting on collective memory, uncertainty and the transient nature of historical events.

The work emerged from an extensive data-mining process focused on major international news headlines from 2020. From this vast accumulation of information, a vocabulary of recurring words and phrases was extracted, tracing the language through which a year marked by pandemic, political upheaval, protest, economic instability and social disruption was collectively narrated.

Rather than presenting this material as an archive of headlines, This Too Shall Pass transforms it into a new poetic and musical structure. The selected keywords become the basis of a choral composition, moving from fragments of information into a collective field of voices. Words once encountered through news cycles and digital feeds are slowed down, repeated and recontextualised, allowing their emotional, political and linguistic weight to emerge differently through sound.

The composition unfolds through multiple channels, with individual voices appearing, overlapping and gathering into larger harmonies. In this movement from isolated words to collective song, language shifts away from its original informational function and becomes something more ambiguous – part testimony, part memory, part residue of a particular historical moment.

The same vocabulary extends into the visual and material elements of the installation. Keywords are translated into graphic forms, banners and textiles, allowing data to move from the immaterial space of digital information into physical objects and surfaces. Across different sites, these visual elements create a second register of the work in which language is not only heard but seen, repeated and spatially encountered.

Each location activates the project differently. Along the River Main, the work enters the open and constantly moving environment of the city; within the Römer Courtyard, it becomes embedded in a civic and historical setting; and inside Dreikönigskirche, sound, voice and visual language take on another resonance within the architecture of the church. The project therefore unfolds not as a single installation replicated across Frankfurt, but as a constellation of related experiences shaped by their specific surroundings.

The title This Too Shall Pass introduces another temporal dimension. The phrase carries both consolation and uncertainty: an acknowledgement that moments of crisis eventually recede, while also recognising that their effects, memories and traces remain.

Through the convergence of data, language, choral sound, textile and public space, This Too Shall Pass transforms the vocabulary of a particular year into a dispersed urban composition. Rather than fixing 2020 into a single narrative, the work allows its fragments to circulate again—in voices, images and materials – where they can be encountered at a different pace and from the distance of memory.