INSTRUMENTS FOR INQUIRING INTO THE WIND AND THE SHAKING EARTH

Instruments for Inquiring into the Wind and the Shaking Earth (2014-2019) is an incandescent landscape —a unified visual field that illuminates space. Through a language both abstract and physical, this monumental site-specific installation describes the engine that powers the stars; the geometry of gravity, space, and time; the emergence of life from non-living components; the possibility of being in two places at once; the distorting forces generated by black holes; and the deep symmetries that underlie it all. Developed in collaboration with physicists and mathematicians at UNAM, NASA, and the Imperial College of London, the installation was conceived as an immersive environment—an act of discovery, achieved through cycles of unknowing and exploration. Like fog in a state of suspension, a cloud of numbers rests in the transitional zone of architectural space. Mathematics is materialized in the form of hyper-objects: non-tangible things that influence and transform the world. The Universe is summoned and summarized.

This installation brings together mental abstractions and physical phenomena that originate in very different aspects of our lives. It humanizes our knowledge of cosmic concepts, maps roads taken and then abandoned, offers intimate introductions to the courageous ones who imagined what others could not yet fathom. Instruments for Inquiring into the Wind and the Shaking Earth exists in a dimension where time is absent, where history and memory are unified into a projection of scientific progress and painstaking efforts to understand the natural world. Each hand-written neon equation is a memento mori as well as an object of resistance against death, revealing a more complex and nuanced reality. At certain times during exhibitions, vocalists and performers interact with the architecture, the work, and the public. Live voices produce a chorus that emanates and migrates, transforming the space into a soundscape. Like Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, Galvani’s work seems to envision a new cosmology—one that honors the power of human knowledge while simultaneously negotiating the impossibility of calculations and instruments to behold the mysteries they seek to describe.

https://www.andreagalvani.com/instruments-for-inquiring-into-the-wind-and-the-shaking-earth