The Sound of Damaged Eggshells. Luzie Meyer |

In June 2025, I enter the previous canteen of the Sophiensæle in Berlin and listen to sounds transferring by way of the room. A quiet voice slowly turns into clearer and extra tangible.

A poetic textual content in English and German unfolds, stuffed with rhymes, alliterations, homophones, semantic shifts, metaphors, and wordplay. Through repetitions and sonic patterns, a number of layers of that means start to intertwine. Again and once more, the tapping, dragging, and placing of a faucet dancer might be heard. The twenty-minute, six-channel sound set up titled Berlin Piece for Voice and Tap Dance (2025) was proven on the thirteenth Berlin Biennale. “A nice-to-have-had,” echoes by way of the room, all of a sudden sounding from someplace behind me, whereas the clacking footwear proceed transferring by way of the house.

As I write this, books are piling up on my desk: Lucia Farinati and Claudia Firth’s The Force of Listening (2017), Alice Notley’s Telling the Truth as It Comes Up (2023), and Dagmar Herzog’s The New Fascist Body (2025). Meyer and I often change ideas on principle, literature, and poetry, at all times with pleasure. Language is each an vital and foundational component in her observe, alongside the type of listening described by Farinati and Firth, a listening that exceeds the purely verbal, transferring by way of the physique and shaping relations and actions. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, they counsel that the disaster isn’t an absence of tales however an absence of listening, and that listening itself calls for one thing in return: taking in what has been heard and carrying it ahead. The extra one opens as much as listening, the extra susceptible one turns into to sure sorts of sounds, narratives, histories. And the tougher it turns into to stay unchanged by them.

The work is a response to a particular second in Berlin’s cultural and political life: the months between October 2024 and June 2025, through which a governing coalition collapsed, elections adopted, and cultural funding got here underneath severe risk. Around this, different pressures had been accumulating for a while: the more and more precarious situations of cultural employees, mounting assaults on creative freedom, a deeply polarized debate about Germany’s place on the conflict within the Middle East, and the rise of the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). All in opposition to a broader backdrop through which fascism had returned not as rupture however as one thing disturbingly acquainted, self-reflexive, even seductive.

The composition consists of fragments Meyer collected elsewhere, together with the Sophiensæle itself. These fragments come into contact with snippets from Senate debates or up to date information stories. Removed from their authentic contexts, they start to type new relations with each other: quick phrases, generally quietly spoken, then all of a sudden sharper, louder, extra insistent. Repetition, echo, after sound, and linguistic play generate the rhythm of the piece, along with the clacking of the footwear. Listening turns into a strategy of orientation by way of fragments, voices, and political tensions. One turns inside the room, attempting to find the place a sound begins or from the place a voice returns. The former canteen, as soon as used for celebrations and gatherings of the Communist Party of Germany, begins to resonate in another way as previous histories and current situations overlap.

In an e mail, Meyer writes to me about her observe:

“I appropriate historical musical pieces and texts and try to translate them into contemporary lifeworlds, or to highlight genealogical origins and analogies. Many of my works oscillate between composition and improvisation. I “bring” my analysis to locations, the place I then incorporate site-specific components into the rising work.”

Documents of the current and voices from different centuries — in her observe, present political debates and baroque songs, information stories and Walter Benjamin — don’t illustrate each other a lot as they start to talk throughout time. Meyer works in a research-based and site-specific method, transferring throughout sound, voice, video, textual content, pictures, and set up. She studied philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt earlier than finding out advantageous arts with Judith Hopf and Mark von Schlegell at Städelschule. She is presently pursuing a PhD on the HFBK Hamburg. Through conceptual and improvisational methods, her works expose how language and notion are formed by social relations and technological constructions.

On April 10, 2025, Meyer sends me a message: “i met alice notley in stockholm. she cried on stage.”

We each admire the work of the American poet, the best way she understands poetry much less as writing than as a spoken type with/by way of the choirs, ghosts, and historic voices that seem in her texts rather than a sovereign lyrical “I.” In The Acquisition of Language & The Language of Acquisition, an extended poem introduced as a part of the KW’s Pogobar Podcast in March 2021, one thing comparable occurs. The piece opens with a choir: “for myself, of myself, to multiply myself,” and closes with the identical one too. In between, a voice searches for one more, individualized alphabet, one which escapes standardized types of self-description. The language is rhythmic, repetitive, sung. Its intonation rising and falling, looping till a brand new beat arrives and releases you.

At one second, the voice decides to change into an echo. At one other, it begins to sound like an automatic, seemingly nice, smooth, barely mechanical voice. “Words have lost their character,” she says. “They have become too large, too inflated.” The acquainted language of self-optimization, therapeutic, and emotional self-management seems much less as particular person expression than as a part of a up to date logic of worth and change. Like Notley, Meyer doesn’t try to resolve whether or not resistant types of expression are nonetheless doable inside preformatted programs of language. She lets it resonate.

It is a musical piece. Listening to it, my foot begins to faucet.

An identical instability runs by way of Incognito Ergo Non Sum (2020). Still pictures of two actors, taken throughout the rehearsal for a scripted dialogue, are sequenced one after one other, stop-and-go, not fairly movie, not fairly picture. The actors’ faces are coated with acetone, which reacts with the photographic paper and leaves traces that dissolve their faces in another way in every picture, an unpredictable, materials course of. The result’s much less concealment than erasure. As the topic dissolves, the voices take its place. The script, half dialogue, half poem, strikes between the general public and the personal, between the artwork world’s methods of self-presentation and one thing extra uncovered.

Meyer writes in her absurd poem: “Poetry balances on the line between diplomacy, gossip, and intimacy,” and the voice continues, “Think of an egg on top of a wall.”

A pseudo-neoclassical piano drives the rhythm because the dialogue ideas into absurdity. The faces stay hidden, however the language regularly emerges.

In her movie Voir Dire (2024), the face is seen, however authority is destabilized. Meyer collaborates with actress Maria Lehberg to rehearse and reenact a courtroom scene from And Justice for All (1979) inside a Berlin district courtroom. Lehberg assumes the position of the initially male protection lawyer, performing the identical monologue repeatedly: at occasions managed, emotional, nearly extreme. From inside the body, instructions are given. Repetition turns into a subject-forming system, every rehearsal reshaping how the phrases are acquired, how authority is perceived, how judgment kinds.

This strategy of unravelling continues in Trauerspiel, a brand new efficiency that’s organized by Kunstverein Schwerin and can be proven within the Perzina- Saal in June 2026, which Meyer continues to be growing as I write this. She tells me that she has been studying Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) for the piece — his account of baroque drama as a staging of historical past as decay and political disaster, populated not by heroic figures however by mortal, flawed, and grotesque ones. She has additionally been studying Margarete Mitscherlich’s The Inability to Mourn (1967), a psychoanalytic research of postwar German society and its repression of the Holocaust.

Together with actress Leila Grey, authentic sentences are mixed with chosen passages from each texts, distributed amongst 4 exaggerated characters. At one level, Meyer sings a baroque composition by the Italian composer Barbara Strozzi: Che si può fare? — “What can one do? What can one say?” An ode to helplessness and the despair inside it.

I’ve not but heard the piece. In June, I’ll journey to Schwerin to pay attention.

Moments of singing recur all through Meyer’s works, and she or he typically performs herself. During a residency at Berlin’s neighborhood radio station Cashmere Radio in 2023, Meyer researched the trobairitz, the feminine troubadours of twelfth- and thirteenth-century southern France. We spoke about it so much, about these singers and poets who labored inside a extremely ritualized system of courtly love poetry initially structured by males. By adopting and concurrently shifting present kinds, roles, and linguistic codes, they opened up new prospects for feminine talking positions.

Most of their work was destroyed throughout the Albigensian Crusade. In Meyer’s analysis notes, which she shared with me, I got here throughout Roubaud: “song was born and killed.”

That Meyer retains returning to them feels much less like historic curiosity than like a query she retains asking about her personal observe: what does it imply for a voice to intervene in a predetermined discursive observe, or to attempt to refigure embodiments and subjectivity by way of linguistic experimental play?

The poet Lisa Robertson, who has additionally labored extensively on troubadour poetry, speaks of “augmented translation,”[1] a mode involved much less with constancy to the unique than with echo, mutation, and transformation, a recirculation of sound and that means. One Meyer is aware of nicely — she launched me to Robertson’s work.

Within Meyer’s observe, analysis and principle don’t remain on the web page. They change into speech, sound, layering, repetition, fragmentation. They discover a physique. Translation, on this sense, seems much less as a way than as a situation of the work itself: historic texts, voices, and types of language are carried into up to date areas, the place they start to shift, resonate, and reappear in another way.

I preserve taking part in it again.

“language disables innocence on the earth

as eggshells are supposed to be damaged.”

[1] Lisa Robertson, “Lark: An augmented translation of Bernart de Ventadorn’s Can vei la lauzeta mover,” in Anemones: A Simone Weil Project (Amsterdam: If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, 2021), 85.