Time becomes easier to see when somebody has to build it. A wooden cube is placed, another follows, a wall appears, a voice enters, and then the whole arrangement is taken apart. The hour has not passed; it has changed hands.
Lina Lapelytė’s We Make Years Out of Hours fills the Historic Hall of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof until 10 January 2027. Four hundred thousand ten-centimetre wooden cubes form a shifting landscape. Twelve performers and visitors make towers, shelters and hills while songs carry poems by fifteen writers through the former railway station.
A score you can hold
The cubes click softly as they meet. Their scale is domestic, almost toy-like, but their number turns play into labour. Time sounds different when nobody owns the wall. No structure is authoritative because every structure is temporary. The work exists as a set of permissions: stack, listen, join, undo.
Lapelytė has long treated performance as an ecology of voices. Sun & Sea, made with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė, won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2019 by placing an opera about climate exhaustion on an artificial beach. Here the crowd no longer watches from above. It enters the score.
Poetry leaves the page
Lines by Etel Adnan, Forugh Farrokhzad, Mahmoud Darwish, Ocean Vuong, Ilya Kaminsky and others arrive as solos and choral fragments. The poems do not decorate the sculpture with literary seriousness. They interrupt work, alter pace and make private language public for the length of a breath.
This is a different route to the shared speech of Victoria Chang’s poems of knowledge and loss, and to the day protest became collective choreography. Language gains weight by passing between bodies rather than remaining safely attributed on a wall.
The branded commons
The installation is the second CHANEL Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof. Patronage makes the impossible arithmetic possible: material, performers and months of duration. It also shadows a work about common labour with the name of a luxury house. The open museum has a sponsor at the door.
That contradiction need not invalidate the work, but neither should participation be treated as automatic virtue. A hall full of building visitors can become excellent social-media theatre. One current critic raises exactly that suspicion before concluding that the piece escapes it through musical and spatial attention. The escape must be achieved each day; it is not guaranteed by the word collective.
The discipline of listening
The best participatory art does not flatter us for arriving. It changes the quality of our presence. Like Abramović’s architecture of attention, Lapelytė’s hall asks for duration, but replaces heroic endurance with distributed care. Someone builds while someone sings; someone else decides not to knock the wall down yet.
Eventually every cube returns to the floor. That is not failure but metre: form, pause, release. Years are made from hours, and hours, Lapelytė suggests, are made from the brief structures we agree to hold together.