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 work has spanned ancestral poetry and post-punk music but has increasingly moved beyond the performance of spoken or sung words, and towards a sonic language that explores raw communicative effects, body consciousness, and non-human agency. The articulation of noises and meanings often encompasses and exceeds human vocal language: breathing, exclamation, mumbling, ululation, cries, and whispers. This process has evolved in tandem with the creation of frequently monumental sculptural settings for each of her vocal projects, resulting in steel slides, inflatable buoys, or giant net traps, for example. These have become surrogate bodies in themselves, as well as interpretive scores for creating scenes and routines that the artist has termed vocal “rehearsals”.

Her first survey exhibition, “HELLO EVERYONE” at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, is a fragmentary and vociferous archive spanning live events, sculpture, audio installation, moving image, graphic works, and visual scores produced since 2011. This ambitious exhibition acts as a living-and-breathing storage that reconfigures a body of work, as well as works-as-bodies, and spans the breadth of Estruch’s artistic research to date while engaging with her history as a performer. Forming a fluid relationship between active and inactive modes of presentation, and questioning the conventions of displaying and performing artworks, “HELLO EVERYONE” explores the sense and sincerity of verbal expression and the agency of the female voice.

The publication accompanying the exhibition offers the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Estruch’s work. Designed by her 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) reflecting on performance pedagogy; the essay “Voice-Body-Sculpture” by Latitudes – the exhibition curators – which offers the first in-depth overview of Estruch’s practice; and an extended conversation between the artist and the curator Marc Navarro.

The exhibition occupies over 500m2 on the fourth floor of the museum’s Sabatini building, and its opening coincided with the events programmed in Madrid around the 44th edition of ARCOmadrid art fair.