The Speech
A look back at a site-specific live sound sculpture in Paris by Lina Lapelytė
As part of the 2024 edition of the Festival d'Automne, the Bourse de Commerce presented the world premiere of the performance “The Speech” by Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė in the museum's Rotunda in mid-September.
Artist Lina Lapelytė explores performance through music, sound, and the visual arts. Having devoted considerable attention to language in her work, over the past few years, Lina Lapelytė has been delving into its limitations. According to the artist, language increasingly appears to her as a tool of manipulation, prompting her to consider other means of communication, such as attentiveness and care for one another, for other life forms, and the environment. As a gathering of a hundred of children and teenagers, this new large-scale performance, titled “The Speech”, invoked nature to speak about relations and care, as well as the failure of language.
Lina Lapelytė, The Speech, Festival d’Automne, 2024, photosm videos by Martynas Norvaišas and Nikolas Verseckas
With the gracious permission of Pinault Collection.
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
© Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, NeM / Niney et Marca Architectes, Agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier
© Lina Lapelytė, 2024
In this work Lina Lapelytė took a radical approach by erasing all linguistic references. Nearly one hundred local Parisian children, gathered by the artist, were creating a site-specific live sound sculpture, “speaking” by imitating animal sounds. “The Speech” reflected on the failure of language, human fragility, empathy, imitation as a method of learning and understanding the world, and the unheard voices of marginalised groups. At first glance, the performance may seem carefree and playful, yet it points to a child's still-developing sense of self, where the distinction between “I” and “other” has not yet fully formed.
Lapelytė’s intervention into the unique architecture of the building was delicate and ephemeral. In creating a vision of a primordial world where humans and animals are forming, the artist doesn’t suggest a specific narrative. The atmospheric performance invited the audience to listen to both familiar and abstract sounds, which together form an unexpected, chimeric chorus of voices. This experimental musical composition was complemented by scenography designed in collaboration with Rūta Kiškytė, featuring ground-level mist and cardboard—often considered a “children’s building material.” The participants were seemingly invited to construct their own world from it.
There were collaboration with three local schools, and this performance involved children and teenagers aged between 5 and 18.
“It was important to me that this broad spectrum of childhood and the gentle connections and care they show for one another were visible. This raises important questions about what defines a child in our societies, when their voice ‘matures’, and why we tend to equate childhood with primitiveness. It was also interesting to think about how children experience nature, especially considering how increasingly simulated and urbanised their encounters with it have become,” the artist explained.
Lina Lapelytė. Photo: Martynas Norvaišas
