A complex two floors installation focused on the individual as historically subject to movement within socio-geographic space. Today, space is dictated and mapped by the global economy, but it was once governed by other forces, such as nature. Such forces are often centrifugal, creating centers of power that radiate out and homogenize culture, but they simultaneously attract people to them, as the patterns of migration throughout history demonstrate.

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“Change” looks at global capitalism as a force that standardizes and homogenizes our world, and positions this era in a much longer time frame that includes prehistory and the far future. 

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The 17th-century historian, Giambatista Vico, coined the term “barbarism of reflection” to describe the unavoidable moment in which civilization reaches a very advanced but destructive level of self (ish) consciousness. Vico’s description of this stage is almost a prophesy of our time, with our deconstructive relativism coupled with a rejection of overarching ideology. Sensing that we are on the verge of a paradigm shift, or a collapse of an empire and the start of a new era (named by geologists as the “Anthropocene”), Helfman points to an unstable future through which individuals must navigate, as they have done since the dawn of time.