Lafayette Anticipations is presenting a new musical and performative project by the artist Lina Lapelytè, who won the Golden Lion for her collaborative work at the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

The Mutes exhibition will run continuously for several weeks, bringing together a group of musicians and amateur singers who perform throughout the spaces of Lafayette Anticipations. This choir brings together performers with no “musical ear”— an ability to sing in tune, to appreciate, recognise and reproduce a sound. This new kind of choir is thus composed of individuals that had been invited to silence, and the voices that now echo through the conceptual and architectural installation within Foundation invite us to discover other unknown, unexplored and singular soundscapes, through a musical work that challenges the authoritative understanding of tonality and musicality in the Western musical tradition.

Through music, installation, and the orchestration of collective performances, Lina Lapelytè is interested in power structures, cultures, and contemporary ways of being. Taking the human voice as her starting point, the artist Brian Eno describes as “the future of pop music”, leads amateur and professional performers in hybrid singing projects mixing all genres from pop to opera. Lina Lapelytè creates ballads that address issues of ecology, gender, vulnerability, invisibility, and otherness.