No Silence Will Ever Protect You*
Installation view of Laia Estruch: HELLO EVERYONE, 2025. Courtesy Ehrhardt Florez Gallery. Photography: Jonás Bel, 2025.
Laia Estruch’s work moves between sculpture and performance, materiality and action, unfolding an infrastructural yet processual practice that brings together a wide range of mediums and scales. Arising from the spoken word, post-punk music, and contemporary dance methodologies, her voice and body reverberate across her installations—vivid assemblages whose boundaries are often flexible, permeable. Estruch’s interest in the inner and “extra” dynamics of the human voice follows a long artistic tradition in which this medium has been treated as an abundant source of knowledge and a malleable device. The exhibition HELLO EVERYONE, curated by Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna) at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, displays a collection of gestures and materials that either were, or still are, part of a series of projects that took place between 2011 and today. These long-term investigations play with magnitude, language, and time, amplifying her sensitivity to the intersection of art and public discourse. The curatorial approach invites us to consider this retrospective as a workable archive: a navigable repository that shifts the focus away from tangible objects, framing her discipline as a dislocated one—a sense-making method that interconnects different systems of thought, affects, and politics.
Installation view of Laia Estruch: HELLO EVERYONE, 2025. Courtesy Ehrhardt Florez Gallery. Photography: Jonás Bel, 2025.
Among the twenty-seven works shown in the exhibition, a selection of sculptural pieces—initially thought of as stage designs by the artist—spread industrial, playful imagery across the space. As if a kid’s modular game had expanded tenfold, overflowing from the realm of imagination, these monumental works highlight the predetermined nature of the contemporary scenarios we enact. Out of scale and context, in a concatenation of apparently fixed positions, they seem to expose the inherent performativity of our social machinery, revealing the plasticity of the patterns we reproduce daily. But something else is missing—these pieces aren’t just waiting until the next reenactment. Some of them have changed in shape, appearance, or position since they were first manipulated; some of them contain whistles, melodies, and screams inside a structure that just appears to be silent. Estruch’s formal research aligns with the political understanding of infrastructures as interconnected living networks. Often invisible within a seemingly stable order, these networks open up possibilities for resisting its systemic, oppressive dynamics.[1] Her sculptural installations are, therefore, ephemeral architectures that carry a political agenda. Whether they are theatrical fantasies or living bodies, they are not structures, but infrastructures: they are always in the making, always exceeding the memory we hold of them.
Installation view of Laia Estruch: HELLO EVERYONE, 2025. Image courtesy of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
If you get closer to the works, you will notice that some of them are marked with handwritten inscriptions: words, numbers, and scribbles that seem to create a record, or a kind of accountability, of past actions upon matter. This mark-making practice melds together the different media the artist navigates and has been a fundamental element in her work since her early performances. Between documentation and dramaturgy, her scoring configures a choreographic strategy that allows her not only to remember but also to communicate unspoken stories. But the exploration of these “living sheets”[2] goes beyond the gesture of scratching or writing over a bright, polished surface: a sense of virtuality spreads over Estruch’s practice, informing both the formal aspects of her research and her exploration of language and orality. As a collapse in the cohesion of time and memory, an overlap of narratives and cultural symbols, or just as a trace of a previous movement in the space, virtuality always brings some kind of dislocation to the present moment. That which was missing is now breathing, even if it remains vague or evanescent.
By focusing on the mechanisms of enunciation, Estruch’s vocal practice treats discourses not merely as statements, but as social forces grounded in the act of communication. When her distant voice starts to resonate through the exhibition space, you’ll see the fabrics, ropes, and metal platforms murmuring, even though you won’t catch half of what she’s saying. And it won’t be necessary: these expansive exercises act as allegories of the accessibility policies of contemporary public speaking. In this sense, one of the most relevant aspects of her work may be its ability to break the silence, piercing the institutional space like an arrow. By treating language as an infrastructure in itself—one we must learn to cultivate collectively—her actions challenge our discursive passivity. They call on us to speak out, to stand up, and to share our struggles. To raise our voice in our immediate political contexts. There’s no more time for silence.
Installation view of Laia Estruch: HELLO EVERYONE, 2025. Image courtesy of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Laia Estruch: HELLO EVERYONE is on view at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía from February 26 through September 1.
*Arising from Audre Lorde’s seminal text “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems (Silver Press, 2017).
[1] Lauren Berlant, “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times,”. in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3 (2016): 393–419.
[2] Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna (Latitudes), “Laia Estruch: Voz-Cuerpo-Escultura,” in LAIA ESTRUCH. HELLO EVERYONE, (MNCARS, 2025).
