The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Mother Earth’s Lament) (2025) is a sound and object installation conceived for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo. Drawing on Bienal’s curatorial theme, which frames humanity as an active and ethical practice, the work meditates on the profound and often violent entanglement between human progress and ecological collapse. Rooted in the lens of deforestation, the installation weaves together the emotive force of folk rhapsody, contemporary data-driven compositional structures, and a multisensory environment to create an immersive experience that reflects on the interdependence between the human and the environment.
Resonating with “Fragment I” of the curatorial concept – which urges us to listen to the world and engage with nature as a way of practicing humanity – this work reactivates our auditory, visual, and olfactory capacities in the face of environmental devastation. The installation draws from environmental research, oral narratives, and traditional songs of grief and reverence for nature. These elements are recomposed into a contemporary choral work that gives voice to the Earth’s suffering, and to the fragility of the ecosystems we continue to erode.
The lyrics of the work are structured in the tradition of the folk lament – simple, direct, and emotionally resonant. This lyrical approach enhances the work’s accessibility and depth, inviting intimate connection through poetic imagery, repetition, and call-and-response. The verses recount the Earth’s pain in vivid language, while the chorus anchors the emotional landscape in collective grief. The bridge sharpens the urgency, pointing to man-made environmental catastrophe, while the outro drifts into silence, a fading breath that leaves behind a haunting absence. This structure lends itself naturally to the installation’s a cappella multichannel format: as the choir’s voices emerge individually from bespoke tree stump speakers, overlapping harmonies enrich the folk simplicity, creating a spatial lament that echoes across time.
Folk songs, long vessels of cultural memory, hold within them the ancestral knowledge and lived wisdom of communities that have cultivated coexistence with the land. In The Way Earthly Things Are Going II, these songs are reinterpreted by a contemporary choir of women and embedded into sculptural remnants of the natural world – tree stumps that once resonated with life. Through this gesture, the installation bridges ancestral knowledge and present-day ecological urgency, transforming each stump into a resonant body that mourns its own disappearance. Folk songs endure not because they are grand, but because they are honest. They speak plainly to the heart, transcending barriers of culture or language. In The Way Earthly Things Are Going II, the folk form becomes a vessel for planetary mourning – and perhaps, for a call to attention before silence takes hold.
