Lina Lapelytė fills a Berlin hall with 400,000 wood cubes

May 7. Hamburger Bahnhof opened We Make Years Out of Hours, a Lina Lapelytė installation and performance that occupies the museum's main hall with 400,000 unpainted wood cubes. Each cube is small enough to hold in one hand. The visitor is invited to build.

The piece runs through August. The cubes sit in piles. Visitors stack, arrange, and leave structures behind. The next visitor adjusts or starts over. The performance component involves a chorus of singers who move through the space, though the schedule is irregular and unannounced. The cubes stay.

Lapelytė is known for durational work. Her 2019 Venice Biennale piece, Sun & Sea, was an opera performed on an indoor beach over six months. This one extends the same thinking: time as material, repetition as structure, the visitor as participant rather than audience.

The wood is unfinished pine. No varnish, no color. After three weeks, some cubes show wear. The smell in the hall is sawdust and hand oil. The acoustics change depending on how many structures are standing. A room full of wood absorbs sound differently than a room full of stone.

The title borrows from a line in a poem Lapelytė set to music in 2014. The original text was about waiting. The installation makes the same point by slowing the visitor down. You can't rush a stack of cubes. You either build or you leave.

Hamburger Bahnhof is a former railway station, now a contemporary art museum. The main hall is 300 meters long. Lapelytė's cubes occupy about half of it. The other half is empty, which makes the installation feel like it could expand or contract depending on how many people show up to build.