The artist’s playful takeover of Hamburger Bahnhof is a poetic reflection on love, loss, community and hope
The smell of woodchips emanates from the Hamburger Bahnhof, foreshadowing what visitors will encounter upon entering: 400,000 Rubik’s Cube-size wooden blocks lining and arising from the floor of the museum’s historic central hall. Some are stacked up in monumental architectural forms, others lumped together in rubblelike piles. All of their positions are up for negotiation, however, as both visitors and a professional cast of singers reconfigure them into ever-changing structures. The performers, who wear loose linen tops and trousers as well as workmen’s gloves, intermittently sing a folksy libretto composed from extracts of poetry (all in English) by 15 international writers as they dismantle and rebuild. One line by British writer Bhanu Kapil stands out as a possible statement of intent: ‘This is a spell to stop the loop.’
Welcome to We Make Years Out of Hours, a new installation by Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė. Commissioned as part of Chanel Culture Fund’s ongoing partnership with the Berlin institution, it could easily be dismissed as a family-friendly spectacle – another offering in the German capital’s growing trend of child-friendly exhibitions. (Gropius Bau’s current admission-free playspace for kids and their 2024 Radical Playgrounds programme come to mind.) Yet the communal melodies framing the experience set Lapelytė’s offering apart. Poetic reflections on love, loss, community and hope act as a calm yet clear cry for humanity to rebuild together and, as Kapil’s line suggests, to break the loop of conflict and destruction we are currently caught in.
Audiences are answering the call: children and parents join forces to build towering skyscrapers, while an older participant rests on a stool, handing a younger counterpart blocks to add to their creation. The intergenerational collaboration is touching, and the structures that emerge – colosseum-like forms and graveyards of crosses – appear to comment on how it’s never too late to build order from chaos. As a result, We Make Years Out of Hours can risk being overly sentimental. At times it is, especially when the cast stands atop the makeshift structures to sing their rousing lines passionately, like prophets delivering a new gospel. It’s stronger when they sing as they build, echoing work songs or the communal harmonies of religious orders like the Shakers. (On further research, the piece seems rooted in the ‘Song Celebrations’ of Lapelytė’s native Lithuania. Recognised by unesco, these mass choral gatherings, hosted across the Baltic states since the nineteenth century, have preserved folk traditions while also serving as powerful expressions of resistance during periods of occupation, including Soviet rule.)
There are subtle details to We Make Years Out of Hours that prevent it from being a naively utopian gesture. For example, the performers often unceremoniously knock down audience members’ lovingly built structures, and the jagged edges of the blocks mean that participants are forever conscious of the fragility of the worlds they’re building. The process of creation is like playing Jenga: constructing formations that may crumble at any moment. This precarity isn’t stress-inducing; there is in fact something meditative about the experience. The constant threat of collapse suggests Lapelytė wants to reassure us that we can only play our own small part in a larger system of making. If our efforts fail, we can trust that later in the day, or even in the months the installation is on show, someone else will be along to pick up the pieces and create something new from what remains. If only we could be safe in this knowledge outside the gallery.
Lina Lapelytė: We Make Years Out of Hours is on view at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin through 10 January
