Emotional Infinity is the sound of keys jingling, reminiscent of your ears pricking up at the sound of a loved one coming home or you finally reaching your own place of shelter. Touliatou has created the work in various modules previously but each time the work is a different iteration dependent on which economic model she uses, be it gifted, stolen, or an indebted economy. The keys are sourced through informal contracts of friendship, trust, and confidence from various households of strangers, families, friends, neighbours, and others. None of the objects she uses in her installations is produced or acquired outside this economy. They are, rather, embedded within these economies or acquired as a result of arrangements and agreements made by the artist.

In her recent works, Touliatou has attempted to set up creative conditions in her practice that defer the idea of authorship and enable participation beyond her own singular mode of making. She argues that these new artworks should be rhetorical in nature and should at all costs explore the ethics of collaboration and entrustment, rather than pure aesthetics, aiming to create a relational object of collective agency and action. In this sense, she is not producing a finite object but, rather, orchestrating several voices that punctuate their progression in structures outside her own predictability. As its title also suggests, the piece functions as a loop and an endless repetition, yet each iteration offers a different set of soul contracts. This time it is installed as an interruption – like an eclipse; it reproduces a hybrid time frame asking the viewer to question temporality and the ordinary.

EMOTIONAL INFINITY (the sound of them coming back amplified and looped), 2021
Installation
Electric rotating fans, key fobs, wrenches, power cables, pedestals, steel cables, chains, hooks, paper
Dimensions variable 
Courtesy of the artist
Commissioned and produced by the Athens Biennale