Lina Lapelytė on Poetry, Performance and World-Building

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The Core Details

• Recorded at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, this episode of CHANEL Connects features a conversation between curator Yana Peel and Lithuanian artist and composer Lina Lapelytė.
• The centrepiece is We Make Years Out of Hours, a living installation built from 400,000 raw wooden blocks occupying approximately 25,000 square feet of the former railway hall.
• Live choral performances run four times a week for nine months; 24 singers were selected from roughly 600 applicants through an open call.
• Lapelytė won the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale for Sun & Sea, a choral opera created with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė.
• The title derives from a German song lyric, Wir machen Jahre aus Stunden, which translates as “we make years out of hours.”

A Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof

CHANEL has long supported artists working at the intersection of performance, architecture and sound, and the Berlin commission given to Lina Lapelytė sits squarely within that tradition. The CHANEL commission enabled Lapelytė to occupy the full floor of Hamburger Bahnhof, a nineteenth-century railway terminus turned contemporary art museum, for a nine-month period that the artist herself likened to a gestation. The scale is not incidental; it is structural to how the work functions, drawing visitors into a space that asks them to slow down rather than pass through.

The installation greets visitors first with the scent of raw timber before the visual field opens onto what Lapelytė describes as something between a demolition site and a building site. Audience members are free to stack and dismantle the wooden blocks, a deliberately analog act in a hall where, in its railway years, the imperative was speed. The CHANEL backing allowed this poetic living artwork to exist on a scale that would be unworkable without institutional and brand support of comparable ambition.

Building a World from Wood and Voice

The 400,000 blocks are only one layer of the work. A recorded soundtrack accompanies the space continuously, and four times each week a live choral performance fills the hall with voices moving at the same level as the audience, with no elevated stage separating singer from listener. That proximity is intentional. Lapelytė wanted the experience to feel communal rather than theatrical, with performers and visitors inhabiting the same physical and sonic space simultaneously.

The Open Call and the Chorus

To assemble the 24 performers, Lapelytė issued a call that was deliberately broad, welcoming applicants from outside professional performance backgrounds. One accepted singer described himself simply as a sailor who liked singing with others. Approximately 600 people applied, a response that Lapelytė described as mind-blowing and that she took as a reflection of Berlin’s density of artistic voices. The performers work in groups of 12 on a rotating basis, and the score itself was written with the specific people who would perform it already in mind, making the composition and the casting inseparable.

Poetry, Folk Tradition and the Title

Fifteen poets’ texts are woven through the work, among them Ocean Vuong and Etel Adnan. Lapelytė spent an extended period reading poetry spanning roughly a century, drawn to the capacity of a single poem to locate precisely where humanity stands and where it might be heading. The Lithuanian folk tradition of Sutartinės, a form built from divergent melodic lines that resolve into agreement, runs through her compositional instinct without being cited overtly. The title itself came from a German song lyric that surfaced in her mind when she first received the Berlin invitation, its phrase feeling like an exact fit for a work about time, presence and collective making.

From Sun & Sea to Berlin: A Continuing Practice

The path to Hamburger Bahnhof passes through several earlier works that clarified Lapelytė’s approach. Have a Good Day, a collaborative piece with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė, placed ten supermarket cashiers in song, using the rhythms of retail labour as compositional material. It marked Lapelytė’s return to melody after years of electronic and experimental music, and it forced her to begin singing herself as the only reliable way to show performers what she wanted. That shift from trained violinist to composer-performer remains central to how she works.

Sun & Sea, the choral opera that won the Golden Lion at the 58th Venice Biennale, extended those concerns into climate and consumption. Performed on an enclosed indoor beach at a military compound in Venice’s Castello district, the work placed singers among sunbathers, delivering personal monologues that circled ecological exhaustion without ever naming it directly. The libretto, written by Vaiva Grainytė, avoided the word plastic entirely while building every individual story around the logic of depletion. We Make Years Out of Hours carries that same structural generosity forward, exchanging the beach for a forest of blocks and adding the dimension of physical audience participation. Those interested in following the full CHANEL Connects conversation can watch the official film on the CHANEL YouTube channel.

Why It Matters

For luxury audiences across the GCC who follow CHANEL’s cultural patronage alongside its fashion and fine jewellery output, this episode of CHANEL Connects illustrates the breadth of the house’s engagement with contemporary art at the highest level. Lapelytė’s practice, built on communal participation, poetic rigour and an instinct for the generously human, reflects values that resonate well beyond Berlin. The conversation with Yana Peel is a useful document of how a major CHANEL commission takes shape from open call to nine-month living work.

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