Laia Estruch: Hello Everyone

Over the last fifteen years, Laia Estruch (Barcelona, 1981) has produced a consistently personal body of work that treats the human voice as a material reality—an expressive force and a medium expelled from the body. Her practice has spanned ancestral poetry and post-punk music but has increasingly moved beyond the performance of spoken or sung words toward a sonic language that explores raw communicative effects, body consciousness, and non-human agency. The articulation of sounds often extended and exceeds human vocal language: breathing, exclamation, mumbling, ululation, cries, and whispers. This vocal exploration has evolved in tandem with the creation of frequently monumental sculptural settings – steel slides, inflatable buoys, or giant net traps– that function as surrogate bodies as well as interpretive scores for staging her “vocal rehearsals”.

Her first survey exhibition, “HELLO EVERYONE” at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, presented a fragmentary and vociferous archive spanning live events, sculpture, audio installation, moving image, graphic works, and visual scores produced since 2011. This ambitious exhibition operated as a living-and-breathing repository that reconfigured a body of work – as well as works-as-bodies – while engaging with her history as a performer. By forming a fluid relationship between active and inactive modes of presentation and questioning the conventions of displaying and performing artworks, “HELLO EVERYONE” probed both the sense and sincerity of verbal expression and the agency of the female voice.

The publication accompanying the exhibition offers the first comprehensive monograph on Estruch’s work. Designed by longtime collaborator Ariadna Serrahima (If publications) and published by the Museo Reina Sofía, it includes a new text by artist Sharon Hayes (Estruch’s former professor at The Cooper Union) on performance pedagogy; the essay “Voice-Body-Sculpture” by Latitudes – the exhibition curators – offering the first in-depth overview of Estruch’s practice; and an extended conversation between the artist and the curator Marc Navarro.

Occupying over 500m2 on the fourth floor of the museum’s Sabatini building, the exhibition opened to coincide with the cultural events in Madrid surrounding the 44th edition of ARCOmadrid art fair.