The Architecture of Listening: Lina Lapelytė at Hamburger Bahnhof

Lina Lapelytė transforms the vast historic hall of Hamburger Bahnhof not through monumentality, but through repetition. Hundreds of thousands of small wooden cubes pass through human hands—stacked, scattered, dismantled, rebuilt—while voices drift through the space in fragments of poetry, breath, song, and refrain.

In We Make Years Out of Hours, the Lithuanian Golden Lion-winning artist and composer turns the museum’s soaring architecture into something unexpectedly intimate: a shifting landscape of collective labour, listening, and coexistence. Visitors do not simply observe the work; they enter into its rhythm. Somewhere between the soft knocking of wood against wood, performers singing in chorus, children building temporary structures, and strangers lingering beside one another, the hall begins to breathe differently.

Created as the second annual CHANEL Culture Fund commission, the work unfolds over several months with no fixed form ever settling into place. Opened on May 1 and on view through January 10, 2027, the exhibition is included in Hamburger Bahnhof’s programme for Berlin Art Week this September. Structures rise and collapse. One person continues what another has abandoned; someone else unknowingly dismantles it. What emerges is less an installation than a living social choreography.

Over the past decade, Lina Lapelytė has developed a singular artistic language shaped by listening, vulnerability, and collective resonance. From Have a Good Day! (2011), in which supermarket cashiers sang the rhythms of invisible labour, to the acclaimed opera Sun & Sea (2019)—both made in collaboration with Vaiva Grainytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė—her work, including her solo practice, unfolds not as spectacle, but as a situation of attention. “This is not really large scale,” the artist says at one point, almost laughing. “It’s just a cube.”

And yet, as the hours accumulate, something larger slowly takes shape—not an object to possess or fully comprehend, but a temporary structure of attention built through patience, presence, and the fragile act of listening to one another. Speaking with Whitewall, Lina Lapelytė reflected on impermanence, collective participation, intimacy, and the quiet possibility of rebuilding through shared experience.

Lina Lapelytė Rebuilding as a Way of Being

WHITEWALL: Your work often approaches time not simply as a condition, but as something that can be shaped and experienced. In We Make Years Out of Hours, how did you begin to conceive of time as something that can be accumulated or made tangible within the space?

LINA LAPELYTĖ: I was thinking about the times we are living in today, and the hardships each of us is going through personally and globally, in the context of wars, misogyny, a lot of nonsense conversations and speeches, and a lot of men in power. I think it was important to think of a space where time could become a place of contemplation, resistance and slowing down.  

Now I can reflect a bit on what the show is doing. It feels that people go back to a very primal place of being—this action of dismantling and rebuilding. For me, that’s a beautiful metaphor. I think we all feel that there is a need to rebuild, and sometimes it is hard to verbalize it. Through making, you can begin to sense more clearly how things need to be.

And then, as well, in the performance we use the language of poets—poetry—and that’s another layer that is very important for me in times where language is used a bit abusively, almost as a manipulative tool. These poets come from very different generations and places, and sometimes a poet, in one sentence, can express everything we sense and know but are unable to articulate. So for me, it was important to rely on that language and these poems to also reflect on how we feel today.

“The performance we use the language of poets,”

-Lina Lapelytė

WW: The installation is composed of hundreds of thousands of wooden cubes—simple modular elements that collectively form a constantly shifting landscape. How did this material enter your thinking, and what does it allow you to express about repetition, labour, or social behaviour within the work?

LL:  Material had to be raw, simple and light. Big enough to build structures, but still something that can be managed by many types of hands. 

People are so engaged with the work, and it’s almost beyond expectation. There’s this moment of seeing how some people care only about their own building and are not very aware that maybe they are dismantling something that someone else built. Some go immediately into demolishing other things. Some continue the work that someone else started before.

So it becomes a scaled-down version of society, where you can observe it as social research. Some people completely ignore the performance happening around them and only care about the building. Others are very attentive listeners and embrace it all. 

It was created as a space for exploration, play, contemplation, and it feels that people are really doing that.

Besides the wooden installation, there are beautifully designed benches by Mantas Peteraitis’s architecture studio, inviting visitors to engage with the work in a more contemplative way.

WW: Voice has long been central to your practice, often blurring the boundary between the individual and the collective. In this work, how do you think about the relationship between a single voice and the larger chorus?

LL: The choir has something very special in my work. When one person says something, it means one thing, but when voices combine and there are harmonic connections between them, the message—or the spread of it—has much more power.

We connect through voice and resonance. So the choral gathering, for me, is very important as a conceptual statement, as a version of people coming together and resonating with one another.

When the Work Belongs to Everyone

WW: You trained as a violinist. How does that musical background continue to shape the way you think about performance and space?

LL: Music has a big impact on how I do things. I always had a bit of an outsider’s view while studying it—I never really enjoyed it in the traditional sense. But I always saw music as something more than sound.

For me, the spaces where music is performed, the way it is performed, and the relationship between the audience and the stage are all part of music itself. I then took that further into my art practice, still reflecting on what music is, and also thinking about it as a form of visual art.

WW: The work invites both performers and visitors to actively reshape the environment. How do you think about authorship when the form of the work is continuously altered by others?

LL: Well, the authorship is the invitation itself. The invitation expands to the performers who are shaping the work. There are 24 people who are part of it. They know the score, and we worked on it together.

Then the public, the people who come to the museum, also join this invitation. They do not know the score, but they are free to bring in their own visions of what should be built.

WW: The installation is continually being built and dismantled, never arriving at a fixed form. What role does impermanence play in your thinking?

LL: Impermanence is also a reflection of our times. We, as people on this planet, understand how fragile things are. And not taking things for granted has been on my mind in recent years. Nothing is permanent.

So that fluidity—the way the wood moves around in the space, how one day you build something and the next day you arrive and it has become something else—is a little version of our lives, almost an excerpt of life being played out through the cube installation.

I’m also someone who tries to embrace chance encounters. I train myself to remain open to the unknown and to those magical coincidences that sometimes happen in life—and that also happen here in the space.

What a Museum Leaves Behind

WW: Presenting this commission within the historic hall of Hamburger Bahnhof introduces a very particular architectural and institutional context. How did the space shape the work for you?

LL: I really like working site-specifically, and it influences what you can do and how you can do things. But site specificity is not just the hall itself—it’s also Berlin as a city, and what it means to create something here.

The museum as an institution is also a very special context. How do you deal with that? What do you want the viewer to receive in an exhibition hall? That’s also a curatorial question—what kind of artist they invite to do the next project.

The way I work has a certain openness to it, because in general, I’m not thinking about the typical museum or fine arts audience.

“There is nothing there besides wood….It’s a very simple, basic shape,”

-Lina Lapelytė

WW: Natural materials appear throughout your practice, and in this work the wood itself comes from Lithuania. What draws you to these materials?

LL: For me, it was very important to see whether it is possible to produce an artwork without heavily polluting. Everything we do leaves footprints, especially within museums and institutions.

I wanted to think carefully about the materials—using something untreated, something raw. Of course, we are talking about wood, so a tree still had to be cut. It was not an ancient forest; it came from an industrial monoculture forest.

In the end, I’m very happy that the wood remains completely raw. There is nothing there besides wood. We did not need to build supporting structures or use glue to hold things together. It’s a very simple, basic shape.

After the show, the wood will travel to another public artwork I was invited to create, so it continues its life. When it is possible to work in this way, I feel very happy. And of course, it requires a collaborative mindset from the museum as well.

WW: This project was realized in the context of the CHANEL Culture Fund. How did that framework influence the development of the work?

LL: I felt very supported by both the museum and the CHANEL Culture Fund—supported in terms of freedom—to truly think through my own vision. That’s the most wonderful thing an invitation like this can offer an artist.

I’m very grateful for the generosity of both the museum and the fund. I was able to work with beautiful performers, beautiful poetry, and the materiality that felt correct to me. 

Just a Cube

WW: Your works often unfold through small, repetitive gestures that gradually accumulate into something much larger. How do you think about the relationship between intimacy and scale?

LL: As I mentioned, I had difficulties thinking about making art when the world feels like it is falling apart. Then I started asking myself what feels important today and how you still find a reason to make things.

The only real reason for me is that small, intimate human connection, which then resonates on a larger scale. Someone asked me a few days ago what it feels like to work on such a large scale, and I answered: this is not really large scale. It’s just a cube. Ten by ten by ten. It’s actually very small.

It’s the same with us as people. If you begin with something small—if you are able to connect deeply with someone close to you and be attentive to them—then that resonance of humanity and relationships can expand outward into something much larger.

For me, the small and the grand function on exactly the same level.

“For me, the small and the grand function on exactly the same level,”

-Lina Lapelytė

WW: You originally trained as a violinist before moving toward experimental music, performance, and installation. How did that shift begin to shape the artistic language you work with today?

LL: When I realized I would not become a classical violin player, I started working a lot with experimental music, noise, and listening, but in a very different way.

At some point I thought: if I showed this to my grandmother, she would not understand or connect with it at all. So I started exploring the genre of song, thinking of it as a way to remain within music while inviting listening through something people could connect with or recognize more easily.

Once you find that point of connection, it becomes much easier to speak about more complex ideas. However, I’m glad I could collaborate with two experimental sound artists for this work: Peter Cusack, who provided field recordings from sites across Berlin, and Daniel Bürkner, with whom we co-composed the soundtracks for the songs.