Lina Lapelytė

The Speech extends Lina Lapelytė’s conceptual and site-specific experimentation into the connection between sound and togetherness. As such, the performance’s premise initially stresses a rupture: that experienced by increasingly urbanized generations, ever further separated from natural environments. Here, the artist wonders how the memories and fantasies that animals might evoke in youths can be rendered through sound. Play becomes a key tool in prompting these associations through a chorus of voices. What might emerge is an unexpected soundscape composed of vocalizations that form chimerical reverberations rather than individually recognizable sounds. It is perhaps this very sonic camouflage, at the core of the piece’s partition, that best evokes our growing distance from companion species. It is also through this shared venture that the artist examines kinship within a group, gathering children and teenagers alike. Tender connections might be rekindled through the very act of sounding together in a world where language is used to manipulate and control.

Interview with Lina Lapelytė