At the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh presents The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Mother Earth’s Lament), a multisensory installation in which voice, scent, silence, and charred wood converge into a requiem for a planet in distress. In conversation with ART AFRICA‘s Suzette Bell-Roberts, Ogboh reflects on listening as an ethical practice rooted in grief, memory and the fragile interdependence between humans and the Earth.
Installation view of The Way Earthly Things Are Going II by Emeka Ogboh during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
Immersive and haunting, The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Mother Earth’s Lament) transforms the 36th Bienal de São Paulo into a chamber of planetary grief. Expanding on his earlier work exploring economic fragility, Emeka Ogboh shifts from the instability of human systems to the trembling ground of ecological collapse. Through a constellation of sound, scent, and sculptural remnants, he composes a lament that rises from the charred stumps of once-standing trees, carrying the weight of both ancestral wisdom and contemporary destruction.
Ogboh’s installation refuses spectacle. Instead, it invites a slow, attentive presence, where overlapping choral voices seep from the cavities of the burned wood and a faint trace of smoke lingers in the air long after the sound fades. In this sacred, fractured circle, listening becomes a form of witnessing. Grief becomes atmosphere. And silence becomes its own kind of testimony.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Mother Earth’s Lament) is a profound reflection on environmental fragility and collective grief. What initially compelled you to return to this project, and how did the Bienal’s context influence its evolution?
Emeka Ogboh: The decision to revisit the work was responsive, not intentional. The first piece, The Way Earthly Things Are Going, addressed economic fragility, the feeling that the ground beneath us was shifting due to financial uncertainty. It centred on Greece, yet its implications were global.
When the São Paulo Bienal invited me, that same sense of fragility and collapse had become distinctly environmental. Presenting the work in Brazil, a country deeply connected to the fate of the Amazon, made the ecological dimension impossible to ignore. The land itself pushed the idea toward an extension.
I realised the underlying questions were still the same: vulnerability, collapse, and the fragility of what we rely on, but the focus had shifted from markets to the planet. The context made me realise that instability was no longer just a human condition; it was planetary. What emerged was an evolution, translating the instability of human systems to the longstanding grief of the Earth itself.
Installation view of The Way Earthly Things Are Going II by Emeka Ogboh during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
The Bienal frames humanity as an ethical practice — one grounded in listening and coexisting with the natural world. How does your work respond to this call for attentiveness, particularly in an age when ecological loss often becomes background noise?
Listening is the framework that guides my practice. We live in a time when ecological loss is constantly visible but emotionally numbing, becoming ambient background noise.
The Way Earthly Things Are Going II is an attempt to reclaim attention by creating a chamber of vulnerability. The installation doesn’t shout; it forces a pause through a slow, immersive experience where listening becomes unavoidable. Sound, scent, light, and material work together to shift the visitor from passive consumption to attentive presence.
To truly coexist, we must remember that the natural world has a voice, often a murmur or a quiet ache. The work brings the “background noise” of ecological loss to the foreground, turning abstraction into atmosphere. It asks us to be human by being attentive, and to be attentive by listening.
The installation uses the structure of the folk lament, with overlapping choral voices that seem to weep through the tree stumps. Why did you choose lamentation as the emotional and structural core of the piece?
Lamentation is a powerful, ancient form, a communal technology for holding grief and keeping memory intact. I chose it because the environmental crisis is a form of global bereavement, one that statistics often strip of emotional weight.
The folk lament offers an emotional architecture capable of carrying this weight without seeking resolution. The overlapping choral voices mirror the cyclical, persistent nature of real grief. And by allowing the choir’s voices to emerge from the cavities of the charred tree stumps, the lament becomes more than human.
The human voice becomes a vessel for the forest’s silence. This layering gives the sound a different gravity; it is both mourning and testimony. Lamentation is raw and insistent, resisting spectacle and asking the viewer to sit with the discomfort of loss.
Installation view of The Way Earthly Things Are Going II by Emeka Ogboh during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
Your practice often extends beyond sound to engage all five senses. In this work, the auditory, visual, and olfactory elements merge into one experience. How did you conceive of this sensory layering, and what kind of embodiment do you hope it invites in the viewer?
For me, the senses are different entry points into memory, emotion, and awareness. Sound is often the backbone of my work, but it doesn’t stand alone; it always extends into the body. The installation had to be felt physiologically, not just heard. Ecological collapse is tactile, not abstract, so I built an environment where the senses overlap as emotional cues, from the scent of burnt wood and the red-orange glow to the charcoal on the floor, all reminders of a landscape marked by fire and loss.
Today, we mostly consume crises through screens. We see images of wildfires, floods, and droughts, but we rarely feel them. Our relationship to disaster has become flattened, almost weightless. This installation tries to restore that weight by making the body porous. The sound wraps around you; you inhale the work. Its centre is not an object to look at but a site to enter, drawing the viewer inward.
I seek embodiment over spectatorship, for grief to become spatial. And crucially, the scent lingers on the listener after they leave, a subtle, persistent trace that reminds us that ecological loss does not remain inside gallery walls. It travels with us.
By using folk songs and sculptural remnants of tree stumps, the installation bridges ancestral wisdom and environmental collapse. How do you see traditional knowledge systems contributing to the contemporary dialogue on climate change?
Traditional knowledge systems approach the Earth relationally rather than extractively, understanding it as a living community rather than a resource. This perspective feels vital today because mainstream climate discourse often overlooks the emotional, cultural, and ethical dimensions of ecological loss.
In The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Mother Earth’s Lament), the folk song becomes a link to older ways of knowing, while the charred tree stumps embody the rupture and imbalance we now see in that relationship. These systems offer a starting point we urgently need: reverence. Reverence encourages humility, patience, and a willingness to listen, not only to experts, but to the land itself.
This is not about nostalgia, but about recognising that the wisdom pushed aside in our rush toward progress may hold keys for rethinking our relationship with the Earth today. It widens the space of understanding beyond carbon metrics to include care, reciprocity, and responsibility.
Installation view of The Way Earthly Things Are Going II by Emeka Ogboh during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
The tree stumps, each fitted with a speaker, are both relics and vessels for sound. Could you speak about your decision to use these organic forms as mediators for the choir’s voices — as if the trees themselves were singing their own elegy?
The charred tree stumps are central because they hold the physical reality of what remains after destruction, a body that has already experienced loss. They are not abstract symbols; they carry their own truth. Embedding the loudspeakers transforms them into instruments of testimony: the forest is gone, yet it speaks. The ruin becomes the monument.
There’s also something significant to me about the tree stump’s humility. It’s not a towering tree anymore. It doesn’t command attention through height or grandeur. It is low, grounded, vulnerable. The smallest, most damaged form becomes the carrier of a voice that fills the room, reflecting the imbalance of our ecological moment.
This material choice also collapses the boundary between human and non-human voice. The choir’s sound is routed through the forest’s material memory, suggesting that the Earth’s lament is intertwined with our own. They are honest forms that embody devastation and convey the fragile persistence of a world still trying to speak.
The work ends in silence, a haunting breath that lingers after the voices fade. What does silence signify for you in this piece — is it a moment of mourning, resistance, or perhaps an invitation to listen more deeply?
Silence is never empty; it is a space charged with presence, a continuation of the lament in another form. When the voices fade, the installation shifts from guiding the listener’s attention to returning it to them.
In that moment, silence becomes a mirror. It invites the listener to confront their own inner landscape. It is the counterweight to the sound, the pause after the cry, where consequence settles and you sit with what you’ve heard.
Silence also resists the constant noise of contemporary life. It asks for a slower, more embodied, more vulnerable kind of attention. In this way, it holds mourning and resistance in simultaneous tension. And it opens a question: now that you’ve heard this lament, how will you carry it?
Installation view of The Way Earthly Things Are Going II by Emeka Ogboh during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
Much of your work is grounded in the translation of place through sound. How did São Paulo, as a city and as a metaphorical estuary of cultures and ecologies, shape the soundscape of The Way Earthly Things Are Going II?
São Paulo did not directly shape the work’s literal soundscape. But the framing of the city as a ‘metaphorical estuary’, a meeting point for converging currents, closely aligns with the piece’s internal logic. The installation itself behaves like an estuary, gathering environmental, emotional, and cultural currents into a single circle of sound.
A powerful reference point for me was the event in 2019, when smoke from fires deep in the Amazon travelled nearly 3,000 kilometres and darkened São Paulo’s sky in the middle of the afternoon. The city fell into shadow at 2 p.m. That event was a powerful reminder of how ecological systems ignore political borders. It showed, viscerally, how the forest can enter the metropolis, how a distant devastation can imprint itself on an urban sky.
So the relationship is one of alignment rather than influence. Showing the work in a place where ecological fragility has been made visible sharpens the urgency of the lament. It allows it to be heard not as a metaphor, but as part of a shared global condition.
Emeka Ogboh’s installation is on view at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo until January 2026. For more information, visit 36.bienal.org.br.
