If Lina Lapelytė’s world had a flag, it would be a transparent cousin of the wind. The anthem of this world would probably be a heartbeat, and instead of a coat of arms, the sun in the sky would suffice. On the other hand, such symbolic attributes would probably be unnecessary, because in her creative world Lapelytė establishes subtle tensions, contradictions and a deliberate disorder between what has been accepted as a constant or a standard and what would happen if the settled rules and hierarchies were rejected. Perhaps this is why the artist’s work itself defies attribution to specific disciplines. Resisting sound and music, Lapelytė delves into its very ontology – the circumstances of performance and propagation, the conditions of origin, the characteristics of hearing. The artist’s approach to music is far from conventional definition or canonical performance, and her expression does not fit into sheet music. It can be said that Lapelytė creates music that must be looked at. Hence, sound experiments take on various performative forms – from sound installations (The Trouble with Time, 2017, Rupert, Vilnius; Here Hear Hare Hair, 2022, SPACE, London), contemporary operas (Have a Good Day!, 2013, and Sun & Sea, 2017 both together with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė), performances (Hunky Bluff (2014), Candy Shop (2013/2015), etc) and experimental compositions to the creation of soundscapes or listening spaces in urban locations, galleries and museums (Copper Lick, 2024, Public Art München, The Mutes, 2022, Lafayette Anticipations Foundation Gallery, Paris; Currents, 2020, RIBOCA2, Riga).
Lapelytė manipulates the boundaries of genres, so this creative tactic encourages her to be described not by the narrow definitions of a composer, musician, sound or performance creator, but rather as an artist in the broadest sense of the word. She is a representative of a tractable creative world, a world that – if it were the artist’s will – would not be constrained by strict borders, defined by fixed national attributes, but which instead obliged one to care about the people and the place where one was born or fostered one’s identity. Lapelytė’s attentiveness to such fundamental topics as gender, age, beauty, cultural identity, otherness, ecology, vulnerability, issues of hierarchical structure or social groups shows the artist’s sensitive ear for humanity.
Lapelytė creates for people about people and with other people. In the past she has collaborated extensively with musicians such as Angharad Davies, David Toop, John Butcher, Eddie Prevost, Peter Cusack, Rhodri Davies, Leafcutter John and others. One of the distinguishing features of Lapelytė’s work is her practice based on working with groups of people. She brings together professional and/or inexperienced performers in communities of the piece and invites them to create together. This working principle of creating events rather than specific material exhibits reflects the artist’s value constitution – the idea of sustainability is the most important thing. Using the uniqueness of the human as a creative instrument, Lapelytė simultaneously talks about the extraordinary power and fragility of human beings, their flaws and beauty, generosity and possessiveness, pollution and efforts not to harm anyone.
Born in 1984 and raised in Lithuania, Lapelytė’s work does not contain decorative or declarative archaic elements, but rather an integral sound and image that has shaped the artist’s identity, a sense of place and the specific knowledge and traditions formed by people. Perhaps that is why her installations also include natural elements such as nettles, which act as a metaphor for people who are singing out of tune and thus musically unacceptable by convention in the work Study of Slope (a.k.a The Mutes), 2022, Lafayette Anticipations Foundation Gallery, Paris), or a floating island formed from more than 2,000 pine logs, reminiscent of the customary practice of transporting timber down the river (sculptural and sonic installation Currents, 2020, with Mantas Peteraitis). The artist uses a similar approach in the performative concert Ladies (2015), in which the the kanklės (zither) players who have been part of the Lietuva state ensemble for 30 years perform a piece composed for them by Lina, while the movements of their hands produce a hypnotic choreography.
It may appear that Lapelytė also constructs some of her other works on the basis of Lithuanian traditional sutartinės – polyphonic songs included in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List. Certain motifs are repeated, combined and reiterated, creating layers of simultaneous sounds from different times, manners and contexts. In this way, synthetic electronic sound modulations flirt with voice as well as the sounds of the clavichord, accordion or violin, usually played by the artist herself, while everyday rituals are interwoven with intellectual passages from the history of music and art, as well as subtle political statements. Lapelyte’s typical minimalistic score becomes suggestive through paradoxical or ostinatic (i.e. persistent, insistent) compositional techniques and conceptual fusion of sound and image. Repetition in the artist’s work can be interpreted as a performative mode of the works, often reinforcing the impression of pastiche or the grotesque, or as a repetitively embedded anxiety.
It is also interesting to note that the artist’s conceptual interest in collective customs, in a heritage that is not subject to time or, on the contrary, in a heritage that requires a revision of its values, also brings contemporary folklore such as popular rap songs into the field of her artistic attention. In the performance series Candy Shop (2013/2015), the artist appropriates a hit song by 50 Cent, drawing attention to the lyrics of rap songs, which contain sexualized undertones, power games and gender stereotypes. By turning this popular song into a lullaby performed by women, Lapelytė highlights the paradoxes of modernity and the uneasiness of the lyrics, as well as the objectification of women in pop culture. Close to the post-feminist art tradition, the artist’s sensitivity to women’s identity is also evident in her other works, such as the performance Hunky Bluff (2014), where a low-voiced women’s choir performs arias for castrati written by Handel, Vivaldi or Bach.
The extraordinarily prolific artist received her professional musical (violin) education in Lithuania (at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre), followed by a BA in Sound Arts from the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, and an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in London. This constellation of professions inevitably contributes to a creative result that often has an almost gesamtkunstwerk-like appearance. On the other hand, reflecting on the specificity of her own and other disciplines, Lapelytė questions the limits of professional age, preparation, endurance, fatigue and the body. This is how Pirouette (2017) was born, a performance in which a ballerina of ‘retirement age’ pirouettes for ten minutes accompanied by a famous jazz musician whose virtuosity is limited to a single note.
In her life and work, Lina is a tenacious optimist, implementing organisationally complex or large-scale projects. Often these projects become a challenge for performers who have to sing while floating in the water (What happens with a dead fish?, 2021) or lying on the sand (Sun & Sea, 2017). For the latter, Lapelytė, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė were awarded the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale in 2019. Perhaps the basis of all of Lapelytė’s works is not the production of new sounds, but listening to inaudible voices and language whose communicative devaluation the artist has tackled in her latest works, including The Speech, presented at the Festival d’Automne earlier this year. In this piece, dozens of children of all ages imitated animal sounds in the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, reminding us of the extinction of communication, animal species and a primitively imagined future.
The presence or elimination of language in Lapelytė’s works coincides with other creative tactics based on paradox and opposition – prolongation or shortening of the process, reversing the roles, fame or silence, and changing verticality into horizontality. The greatest and most productive paradox is the artist’s love for mistakes and her persistent, almost methodical work to bring them back into life and creative circulation, understanding them as possible and intriguing tolerance exercises. Although Lina’s work may seem to be co-curated by coincidences, it is in fact meticulously premeditated and acoustically precise, ripe with the feeling that it emerged from listening to the everyday rather than from a desire to be heard. Yet it is the sound of creative work born out of such an intention that spreads the widest.
Profile by Jogintė Bučinskaitė
The 47th edition of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, hcmf// 2024, takes place Friday 15 – Sunday 24 November 2024. Ladies and Pirouette appear as part of hcmf// shorts. Tickets for Study of Slope and Candy Shop are on sale now.