In an upstairs office of the Warburg Institute, we sit surrounded by books and records, listening to Elisabeth Welch’s version of ‘Stormy Weather,’ from Derek Jarman’s version of The Tempest. 'How did this ever come out?' Elaine Tierney, one half of the artistic DJ duo Time Is Away asks. 'I guess they were just friends with Derek,' her collaborator, Jack Rollo muses.
This conversation is a kind of office hours for the fictional university department that Time Is Away have developed with the Warburg Institute: The Department of Euterpe. An installation and sound piece, it imagines the history and afterlife of a department driven by research and speculation, the space itself somewhere between a listening room, study hall, and mixing lab.
At the core of this is Warburg’s own methodology, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: a vast, ever-changing collage of images that aimed to, as Tierney puts it: 'make an art-historical argument without words.' They place emphasis on Warburg’s associative practice, bringing disparate elements together to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts. Euterpe is designed to be an aural version of this methodology; with around half of the sound piece at the installation’s core – which stretches on to around seven hours in duration, which Rollo and Tierney don’t expect anyone to listen to in a single sitting – being 'quotation from various sources we gathered along the way,' stretching from the institutional records and reports of Warburg itself, to novelists like Penelope Fitzgerald and Barbara Pym, whose work is 'heavy with these institutional lives [and] the weirdness of work.'
The associative impulse at the core of the Department of Euterpe stretches beyond just the ways in which Time Is Away have approached the design of the institution itself, which gleefully subverts the ways in which we understand academic institutions like departments and libraries. 'Once you get to the most specific category level, there’s no order,' Rollo tells me. 'So if there are books on the Archangel Gabriel, for example, you just have to look through them. And the idea is you’ll find things you didn’t know you were looking for.'
Euterpe also winks at the limitations of the museum space itself. While some aspects are 'museum-waxed down,' much of what’s on the desks and shelves of the Department itself can be picked up, read, and thumbed through like a physical archive. While exploring the space, I stopped to read a pamphlet on the University of London PhD programme. The Department of Euterpe, then, gestures towards new ways of understanding and relating to academic institutions, as the pair acknowledge 'knowledge institutions are not necessarily comfortable spaces for everyone.'
By taking these objects – pamphlets, old laptops and mobile phones, and paperbacks ranging from Beckett’s Malone Dies to Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love – and placing them in the context of an installation and an academic institution is described to me as being 'a gesture that has quite a lot of power,' as the duo consider the way that 'meaning bleeds between objects.'
It seems impossible to talk about an installation like this without considering the way it intersects with the historical context of the Warburg Institute itself; with the institute exiled during the rise of fascism, it became a part of the University of London in 1944, before the Second World War ended. Now, the emphasis placed on the possibilities of an educational institution still have a sharp political edge, particularly when it comes to an education in the humanities, with Time Is Away stressing the role of empathy in this kind of education, what they call 'stretching beyond the circle of the self.' They look at Warburg as 'old-fashioned in a good way, because people have the time.' Exploring the institution is, fittingly, like listening to a record: it encourages taking the time to revel in what’s on offer, to search for details and surprises, traces of the lives lived and work done inside this fictional institution.
The conception of these characters began with the pair’s record collection, as they asked themselves: 'what would the reason be for these records to be here, if not for us?' It also allowed them to bring their own private collection into the public space of the Warburg/Euterpe, something expanded on by the institutions office hours, where visitors can book time to go into the upstairs office and listen to the record collection, a way past what they call 'the locked door,' as well as, more playfully, the idea that there shouldn’t be 'good toys on the shelf that nobody’s allowed to play with.' Even the constructed figures in the department are given public-facing lives and work; one of the researchers is writing a fictional PhD on the sonic elements of the department and, 'the last [public] radio piece will include some work on how they’ve finished their PhD.'
Time Is Away place an importance on the public-facing aspects of this work – perhaps in the same way that an academic institution prides itself on the research and publications of its real staff. Broadcasting the audio piece in condensed, multi-hour fragments not only allows the story to be told and to remain archived, but also expands the reach of this public knowledge and speculation. As the duo themselves stress: 'not everyone lives in London.'
They also hope to push up against what they describe as an issue in public culture, the sense that 'the listener needs to be handheld through something,' instead aiming to have the show explain itself – beyond the importance of acknowledging the fictional nature of Euterpe – very little and let listeners make sense of it themselves. When describing the installation, Time Is Away make reference to the 'transformative power of knowledge,' something that seems to be given a greater emphasis entirely because of how little is explained to a visitor or listener. Instead, the hope is that, through a context that gives people space and – maybe more importantly – time, they’re able to discover potential meanings and ideas for themselves through the objects in the installation and the recording itself. When describing the sound piece, Time Is Away tell me that 'you have to lean into it,' with this gesture revealing fragments of not just a fictional institution or an expansive record collection, but fragments of ideas and stories that can be held onto.
The Department of Euterpe (1926–2026), Time Is Away, at the Warburg Institute until 2026 until 3 October