Lina Lapelytė – interview: ‘Between this group of performers, what we share is the virtuosity of listening’

Perhaps best known for her eco-opera Sun & Sea (Marina), Lapelytė discusses her approach to improvisation and collaboration, the joy of interacting with architecture and the virtuosity of listening and her new installation at The Cosmic House, London

Lina Lapelyté in the garden at The Cosmic House, 2025. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

by VERONICA SIMPSON

There is an art to deep listening. And a prodigious capacity for listening is necessary to be able to evoke the soft sounds of inhabitation – someone humming in the kitchen as they cook; singing in the shower; tentatively practising an instrument; a child’s unselfconscious attempts at composition – voicing a repetitive phrase while beating out a two-note keyboard rhythm, ad infinitum. But it takes something more to make of this quotidian sonic palette something eternal, earthy as well as spiritual. The work of artist and composer Lina Lapelytė (b1984, Kaunas, Lithuania) builds on a practice of deep listening to deconstruct the meaning and significance of sound and language – teasing apart the components and rearranging them, placing them in contexts that bring extra significance. Her latest installation, In the Dark, We Play, at The Cosmic House in London, sees her and her collaborators create subtle performances, filmed and then screened around the house in the rooms that inspired them. They resonate long after you experience them.

Sun & Sea (Marina) by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, Lithuanian Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2019. Organised by Nida Art Colony, curated by Lucia Pietroiusti. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko. Courtesy the artists and Nida Art Colony.

Her eco-opera Sun & Sea (Marina) was originally staged by Lapelytė and her friends Vaiva Grainytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė at Lithuania’s Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. In an artificial beach setting, drenched in sand and golden light, singers (professional and amateur) in swimwear lounged and played, sang and sweated, meditating on our depleted planet and lives, and our peculiar dependence on escaping the daily grind by taking foreign “holidays” involving travel that pollutes the atmosphere. It won the Golden Lion and has since travelled all over the world – including to Luckenwalde in 2021 (a staging using 100% CO2-neutral energy), London in 2022, and various places in between, including Singapore and Vilnius in 2024. It had just opened in Bogotá, Colombia, as In the Dark, We Play launched at The Cosmic House.

For The Cosmic House, Lapelytė’s interventions are a kind of haunting – not of the spooky, spectral kind, but exploring sensual and celestial, contemporary and ancestral soundscapes. The Cosmic House is an extraordinary home, created by the architectural critic and land artist Charles Jencks and his wife, Maggie Keswick Jencks, the artist, designer and co-founder with her husband of Maggie’s Cancer Care centres, designed by leading architects to present a humane, alternative healing space for those with a cancer diagnosis. They fashioned this family home out of the bones of a grand Victorian townhouse in Holland Park, which they bought in 1978. Over the decades, and with the help of architect and artist friends, it was excavated and radically represented, allowing the couple to play with ideas of a decorative postmodernism, underpinned by investigations into cosmology and philosophy. Every surface is adorned with statues, geometric figures, crystals, fake marbling, mirrors, books, columns or the play of light throughout the day.

Lina Lapelyté: In the Dark, We Play, installation view, The Cosmic House, 31 March – 19 December 2025. Photo: Martynas Norvaisas.

Lapelytė was commissioned by Eszter Steierhoffer, director of the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House, who, since 2021, has overseen this Grade I listed building’s new incarnation as a museum. She asked Lapelytė to respond to an essay by the writer and “researcher of sonic cultures” Ella Finer, which in turn responds to the Cultural History Frieze (1978-83), which Charles Jencks commissioned from William Stok, depicting 12 great philosophers of the last 2,000 years, arranged around the stairwell, in homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Steierhoffer says: “Charles was really interested in thinking about the ways in which we humans are trying to make sense of our existence in the cosmos … Ella’s text is a beautiful reflection in relation to that, coming into the story through Hannah Arendt, who is the only female figure in the frieze. Ella’s piece became a vehicle for Lina to enter the house.”

Lapelytė, having spent time with the house and the text, chose to bring in six “amazing performers and musicians”: Nouria Bah, Anat Ben-David, Angharad Davies, Sharon Gal, Rebecca Horrox and Martynas Norvaišas. Lapelytė says: “We did a piece together 12 years ago (Candy Shop, 2013-15). Twelve is an important number in cosmology. And that’s the only thing I could imagine in this house. It really resonated with Charles’s ideas of having this sort of polyphonic interpretation of things and having many voices. We came to the house together, we took Ella’s text as a starting point, we read it, and it was nice to have this openness from the house and from Ella - we cite some of her lines or we take it further and write our own text. There are these loops of referencing other things, and there are songs that were written by each of us individually.”

Candy Shop—the Circus, Lina Lapelytė, Parades for FIAC, FIAC, Paris, 2017.

There are 10 screened performances, but the piece is experienced as a continuous journey through the various floor levels. Lapelytė says: “This video exists as a one-channel piece: moving through the house, you enter a new song in different parts of the house. We decided to install it like extensions of different spaces, a little window of what a life could be like in this room or that room, or surreal proposals or narratives in the house. It was very important for us to have this lightness and playfulness.”

Lapelytė, who works between the UK and Lithuania, trained as a musician, playing classical violin, before doing a degree in sound art and then an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art. The first major work of hers to attract attention was a collaboration with her Venice associates, a mini opera examining consumerism, called Have a Good Day! (2011/13), which won multiple awards and still tours, as do most of her collaborative pieces, each one drawing in new performers according to the locale, and new qualities as it moves from one distinctive space to another. As a solo artist, she has shown internationally, including at The Voice and the Lens Festival at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and as part of the Park Nights at the Serpentine Pavilion, both 2014, and at the inauguration of the Baltic Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale. However, 2024 was a stellar year.

What Happens With a Dead Fish? (installation-performance), Lina Lapelytė, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 2021. Photo: Bea Borgers. Courtesy the artist and Kunstenfestivaldesarts.

From March to June, a bell-shaped structure - Copper Lick - took up residence in Munich. Lapelytė calls this public art project, which was three years in the making, a “limestone creature” and describes it as “a listening space – an invitation to rethink distances and relationships”. Her work What Happens With a Dead Fish? – which was commissioned by Kunsten Festival des Arts, Brussels, and adapted for Theatre Spectacle, Zurich, in 2021 – was programmed as part of the exhibition Dryades de Cosquer at La Traverse Marseille (August to October 2024) and performed in an empty factory filled with water. Other works were performed in Malta, Kaunas and Vilnius. Have a Good Day! was performed at La Biennale Toulouse and the Nowy Teatr, Warsaw. She ended the year with a new performance of her work The Speech, at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, working with children aged five to 17, as part of the Festival d’Automne, Paris.

Studio International spoke with Lapelytė at The Cosmic House, the day after the official opening of In the Dark, We Play.

Veronica Simpson: When did you first encounter The Cosmic House?

Lina Lapelytė: I was in Paris making The Speech with children, in the Bourse de Commerce. Since I was in the city, I thought I could jump on a train and so I came here and spent the night in the house. It was so bizarre, to arrive at night and enter this huge house, which is amazing. It’s like a kind of dream of having this dialogue between the cosmos and the everyday. It’s the poetry of the universe that you try to live within. You don’t just dream of it, you have it in your daily routine.

VS: I love the simplicity and clarity of the performances against this ornate and highly intellectual backdrop.

LL: Simplicity was important. Here, you can get overwhelmed by the richness of everything having specific meaning, and at the same time I think sometimes you’re just wanting to counterpropose something. I lived a long time with Ella’s text, but then it just felt important to open it up. I shared the text with all the collaborators and performers. Each of them took their own approach towards the house, towards Ella’s text, towards cosmology ideas, and I’m very happy with the result. I find it fascinating when you open things up for more people and more minds. You always end up with something that you would never be able to do on your own.

Have a good day! by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, Arts Printing House, Vilnius, 2018. Photo: Modestas Endriuška. Courtesy the artists and Operomanija.

VS: In your practice, there is this nice mix of working with trusted collaborators – such as your co-creators of Sun & Sea (Marina) and Have A Good Day!, or with these performers, but also creating ambitious versions of your works with new people and in new spaces. You have described yourself as an artist and composer, and the idea of being a composer seems apt – your works are being performed by new communities, all the time.

LL: If I say composer, I feel strange because I’m not really composing for the sake of music usually. It’s more like I compose for the sake of invitation. Because I think music is a very powerful tool to engage and be together. I believe in the idea that resonating bodies are doing things together.

VS: It must be amazing to see how Sun & Sea is still finding new audiences, being sought for new performances all over the world. Are you always hoping for an ongoing life with your work?

LL: Actually, I never envision that. I am always a bit shy before I make a new work. I don’t know what it will be. It’s hard to then think of or assume it will do this and that. I think that’s why maybe I often feel I’m in between different contexts. I’m not really like a musician, or like a visual artist who produces objects, and I’m not really filmic. I’m between places. And some works, when I start to work on them, I don’t really know what they will end up being.

VS: Do you have to be involved in each iteration of your works, around the world?

LL: I try to be, but now Sun & Sea has a huge team and people who know the work as well as I do. I love that the work has this life – it’s as if you had this teenager who has become independent. It’s beautiful. We just had this extraordinary show in Bogotá, Colombia, last week. I was supposed to go but I was so busy with The Cosmic House and a new work, opening in Poland soon, so I needed to be present.

VS: Your work – especially Have a Good Day! and Sun & Sea – is making important points about our role in the depletion of planetary resources and climate change. Do you feel people are encouraged or inspired by seeing them to change behaviours?

LL: Sun & Sea is not an activist work, it’s not a marching piece where we demand things, but it’s trying to touch people in such a way that they could have a feeling of OK, maybe I can do things - it depends on me.

Nouria Bah performing, installation view, The Cosmic House, 31 March – 19 December 2025. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

VS: Where does The Cosmic House work sit within that aspect of your practice?

LL: I think why I was so drawn into thinking of the cosmic, and of dreaming of the universe and kind of enjoying coincidences that maybe are not coincidences, is because the last few years have been so dark, in terms of climate, world events, political climate. That’s where the name In the Dark, We Play comes from. It’s very much proposing another way of being, at a time when the narratives we follow are so heavy, so confusing, so unfair that you want to step back and think of removing yourself from that. That’s following up on the piece I did in Paris, getting kids to use language like an animal – I was working with young kids, from five to 17, using imaginary sounds. It was not about trying to be precise in how we imitate animal language. It’s proposing a different language because language is failing us a bit. And there is a lot of manipulation. Also perhaps in my mind, I’m continuing the proposals for other ways of being. This is what Charles also did with this house, proposing this dream world.

VS: Your work is always very responsive to architecture. Here, it feels like a very restful experience, of imagined inhabitants and the spirit of those who might dwell here, in various dimensions of time and space.

LL: A lot of visitors come to see the house, and the work of art is becoming part of the house rather than being exhibited in the house. It provides this live-ness. It’s all about extending the spaces.

Lina Lapelyté: In the Dark, We Play, installation view, The Cosmic House, 31 March – 19 December 2025. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

VS: There are pale ceramic surrounds framing some of the screens, too.

LL: It’s porcelain - like cosmic matter. And everything is so much about framing in this house - perspectives and frames - so it felt it would be nice to also play with that.

VS: In a house so full of artifice and craft and intellectual achievement, you are bringing these moments of simplicity and everyday beauty, which also seems an important thread in your work.

LL: Yes, because there is so much knowledge that you also want to have the joy. There are different kinds of knowledge. A lot of what is here is intellectual knowledge, but there is also sensual knowledge, and we try to find a balance between the two.

There’s this combination again of cosmic and house, it represents two opposites. For me cosmic is something you dream of. The house is something you live in; it’s very basic. It’s like the work itself is balancing between the texts, some of which are poetic and deep in their meaning and others are really simple things.

In the Dark, We Play, 2025. Video still by Martynas Norvaišas, commissioned by the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House.

VS: The instruments, when you use them, are creating something more granular, elemental, as if sounding out aspects of the house rather than playing to it.

LL: I think, between this group of performers, what we share is the virtuosity of listening. And it was extraordinary for us to be here in the house and to be able to provide that. In general, the way I enjoy music is not about providing sound, but listening. That’s why I love the improvised music scene – it’s very much about that, being able to tune in.

VS: When you leave room for play or improvisation, you are not concerned about the perfection of a finished item?

LL: Yes, I try to be a bit DIY, which is important, this fragility of not being perfect, which for me is a very important thing in an artwork.

VS: There is often such ambition, scale and complexity in where your performances are staged, and how they interact differently with each space and community. Is that daunting sometimes?

LL: When I try to think of this, it’s as a musician. I root myself very much into that musical background, because if you think of what musicians do, they work a lot with these big concert halls. For me, it’s always been about space, spatial experience, what you see on stage, it’s a performance. I never understood it differently. I don’t think I do anything that other musicians don’t do, but I refocus a bit. And then this is the detail that comes into my work.

VS: I am always interested in where artists’ work seems to find the most receptive audiences. Looking at your recent projects, it seems France and Germany are particularly receptive.

LL: France has been incredible, and Germany now. It’s really interesting. It’s extraordinary. For me, London was a place where I matured as an artist, and it’s always been my home, but also having Lithuania as a place. The past three years was very much spent in France. I never assumed my work would be so interesting to them. And now Germany as well, so many proposals to do there. It’s amazing.

VS: And I understand there is now a mini version of Sun & Sea (Marina), The Listening House.

LL: Yes, that happened in Castello di Rivoli (in 2022). They were doing a group show and the curator was very keen that we provide this possibility for people to experience it. We thought it’s kind of an interesting thing, having done this large-scale Sun & Sea, which is a beach full of people, and seen by many people, but what if we reverse it? And then you have a solo experience in a little cabin. All it has is sand, text, sound and a bench and you’re enclosed in this little hut like a changing room on an Italian beach.

VS: It’s a brilliant idea – a space for reflection on climate change. At every holiday destination, every beach should have one.

• Lina Lapelytė: In the Dark, We Play is at The Cosmic House, London, until 19 December 2025..