The Way Earthly Things Are Going 2

Info

• Title : The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Earth’s Lament)

• Year : 2025

• Medium : Multichannel sound installation with sculptural tree-stump loudspeakers, light, charcoal, smoke, and scent.

• Duration : Variable.

Details

The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Mother Earth’s Lament) is a multisensory sound and sculptural installation reflecting on the entangled relationship between human activity, ideas of progress, and ecological collapse. Conceived for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, the work takes deforestation as a point of departure for considering environmental fragility, extraction, loss, and interdependence.

The installation revisits questions first explored in The Way Earthly Things Are Going (2017), created for documenta 14 in Athens. That work brought a traditional Greek polyphonic lament into tension with a continuous stream of global stock-market data, placing human grief and economic systems within the same space. In this second iteration, those questions of instability and vulnerability are redirected toward the ecological crisis.

At the centre of the work is an a cappella composition performed by a women’s choir. Drawing on the emotional and communal traditions of lament, the voices unfold through repetition, harmony, dissonance, and silence. Here, lament becomes more than a musical form: it is a way of holding grief, sustaining memory, and giving emotional weight to environmental loss that is often encountered only through statistics, images, and news reports.

The voices emerge from charred tree stumps transformed into sculptural loudspeakers. Each stump retains the material evidence of a tree that once stood while becoming a resonant body capable of producing sound. They function simultaneously as remnants, witnesses, instruments, and monuments. Through them, the human voice begins to merge with an imagined voice of the forest itself.

Sound is joined by charcoal, a red-orange glow, smoke, and the scent of burnt wood, creating an atmosphere suggestive of a landscape after fire. Rather than literally reproducing a forest, these elements bring the visitor into physical proximity with the sensation of aftermath. Sound surrounds the body, scent is inhaled, and the blackened forms anchor the experience materially.

Silence is equally important. As the choir recedes, the absence of sound becomes a continuation of the lament, leaving the listener with the residue of scent, material, and memory.

The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Mother Earth’s Lament) proposes listening as a form of witnessing. The forest is present through its absence: the tree becomes stump, the stump becomes speaker, and the speaker becomes a carrier of lament. Through this transformation, the work asks how we might listen differently to ecological loss, and reconsider our relationship to the Earth through attention, memory, and care.

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