VERBALUX

We live in a society where words are undergoing an unprecedented erosion of meaning. Universal concepts such as peace, truth, humanity, and freedom have been stripped of their density. Words are consumed and discarded like single-use objects. This installation stands as a poetic act of resistance against this ongoing process of linguistic depletion. 

Language was the way we developed to communicate and share ideas, feelings and abstract concepts. It was developed by humans only 100,000 years ago as a means to achieve mutual understanding of the world. It was subtle but also extremely clear. Instead, written language is only 3500 years old, and it became a way to record thoughts, beliefs, and commitments for the present and future. The written word came to be seen as truth, but its permanence began to clash with the shifting nature of reality, and writing became a way to shape meaning rather than describe the world as it is.

Now, as we shift from the permanence of the written page to the volatility of our digital screens, our relationship to meaning is transforming once again. We are living through one of the most profound transitions in history, from analog to digital, where impermanence and individuality thrive, and the sense of a shared human experience is slowly vanishing.

We see the “machine” as a point of inflection. In the past, it marked our disconnection from an inherently analog humanity, and now we want to use it as a translator between these two worlds. A single precise, divinized, medicalized machine that operates as a laboratory where the analog and the digital intertwine, trying to restore weight, density and substance to the words that once defined us.

In this sense, this machine becomes a ritual where everyone can interact, offering a medium where the digital ceases to be an ephemeral reflection of reality. Instead it becomes an invitation to rediscover words in their most authentic state through the materiality of the analog, words returning to stone.

But as it turns out, the mere act of engraving these words as a pretended truth is a vain effort to preserve their meanings. With each inscription, the laser gradually loses focus, the contours begin to fade, and the words become increasingly blurred and uncertain.

In this instance, we analyzed speeches delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos 2026, examining the language used by some of the world’s most influential nations and corporations. We investigate which words have become overused, diluted, or strategically reframed over time and reveal how meaning shifts under the influence of power and repetition. These words get engraved in stone as a list of words that are in a process of vanishing through a generalized, manipulative, empty discourse, a catalogue of deceased words in this stone that was here for millions of years and will stay here after humanity disappears.

By engaging with our vending machine you become an active participant in the very dynamics being examined. An accomplice and interpreter of the process, offering a moment of reflection on how language is commodified, circulated, and transformed.

Within this ambiguous terrain, material meets immaterial and geology converses with code. The installation invites us to cross this threshold and inhabit it: to be aware of how language can create and destroy our own existence, and how the act of taking care of language is an ontological matter.