In June 2025, I enter the former canteen of the Sophiensæle in Berlin and hear sounds moving through the room. A quiet voice slowly becomes clearer and more tangible.
A poetic text in English and German unfolds, filled with rhymes, alliterations, homophones, semantic shifts, metaphors, and wordplay. Through repetitions and sonic patterns, multiple layers of meaning begin to intertwine. Again and again, the tapping, dragging, and striking of a tap dancer can be heard. The twenty-minute, six-channel sound installation titled Berlin Piece for Voice and Tap Dance (2025) was shown at the 13th Berlin Biennale. “A nice-to-have-had,” echoes through the room, suddenly sounding from somewhere behind me, while the clacking shoes continue moving through the space.
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 occasionally exchange thoughts on theory, literature, and poetry, always with pleasure. Language is both an important and foundational element in her practice, alongside the form of listening described by Farinati and Firth, a listening that exceeds the purely verbal, moving through the body and shaping relations and actions. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, they suggest that the crisis is not a lack of stories but a lack of listening, and that listening itself demands something in return: taking in what has been heard and carrying it forward. The more one opens up to listening, the more vulnerable one becomes to certain kinds of sounds, narratives, histories. And the harder it becomes to remain unchanged by them.
The work is a response to a specific moment in Berlin’s cultural and political life: the months between October 2024 and June 2025, in which a governing coalition collapsed, elections followed, and cultural funding came under serious threat. Around this, other pressures had been accumulating for some time: the increasingly precarious conditions of cultural workers, mounting attacks on artistic freedom, a deeply polarized debate about Germany’s position on the war in the Middle East, and the rise of the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). All against a broader backdrop in which fascism had returned not as rupture but as something disturbingly familiar, self-reflexive, even seductive.
The composition consists of fragments Meyer collected in different places, including the Sophiensæle itself. These fragments come into contact with snippets from Senate debates or contemporary news reports. Removed from their original contexts, they begin to form new relations with one another: short phrases, sometimes quietly spoken, then suddenly sharper, louder, more insistent. Repetition, echo, after sound, and linguistic play generate the rhythm of the piece, together with the clacking of the shoes. Listening becomes a process of orientation through fragments, voices, and political tensions. One turns within the room, trying to locate where a sound begins or from where a voice returns. The former canteen, once used for celebrations and gatherings of the Communist Party of Germany, begins to resonate differently as past histories and present conditions overlap.
In an email, Meyer writes to me about her practice:
“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 research to places, where I then incorporate site-specific elements into the emerging work.”
Documents of the present and voices from other centuries — in her practice, current political debates and baroque songs, news reports and Walter Benjamin — do not illustrate one another so much as they begin to speak across time. Meyer works in a research-based and site-specific manner, moving across sound, voice, video, text, photography, and installation. She studied philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt before studying fine arts with Judith Hopf and Mark von Schlegell at Städelschule. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the HFBK Hamburg. Through conceptual and improvisational strategies, her works expose how language and perception are shaped by social relations and technological structures.
On April 10, 2025, Meyer sends me a message: “i met alice notley in stockholm. she cried on stage.”
We both admire the work of the American poet, the way she understands poetry less as writing than as a spoken form with/through the choirs, ghosts, and historical voices that appear in her texts in place of a sovereign lyrical “I.” In The Acquisition of Language & The Language of Acquisition, a long poem presented as part of the KW’s Pogobar Podcast in March 2021, something similar happens. The piece opens with a choir: “for myself, of myself, to multiply myself,” and closes with the same one too. In between, a voice searches for another, individualized alphabet, one that escapes standardized forms of self-description. The language is rhythmic, repetitive, sung. Its intonation rising and falling, looping until a new beat arrives and releases you.
At one moment, the voice decides to become an echo. At another, it begins to sound like an automated, seemingly pleasant, soft, slightly mechanical voice. “Words have lost their character,” she says. “They have become too large, too inflated.” The familiar language of self-optimization, healing, and emotional self-management appears less as individual expression than as part of a contemporary logic of value and exchange. Like Notley, Meyer does not attempt to resolve whether resistant forms of expression are still possible within preformatted systems of language. She lets it resonate.
It is a musical piece. Listening to it, my foot begins to tap.
A similar instability runs through Incognito Ergo Non Sum (2020). Still photographs of two actors, taken during the rehearsal for a scripted dialogue, are sequenced one after another, stop-and-go, not quite film, not quite image. The actors’ faces are coated with acetone, which reacts with the photographic paper and leaves traces that dissolve their faces differently in each image, an unpredictable, material process. The result is less concealment than erasure. As the subject dissolves, the voices take its place. The script, part dialogue, part poem, moves between the public and the private, between the art world’s strategies of self-presentation and something more exposed.
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 as the dialogue tips into absurdity. The faces remain hidden, but the language continually emerges.
In her film Voir Dire (2024), the face is visible, but 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 court. Lehberg assumes the role of the originally male defense lawyer, performing the same monologue repeatedly: at times controlled, emotional, almost excessive. From within the frame, directions are given. Repetition becomes a subject-forming device, each rehearsal reshaping how the words are received, how authority is perceived, how judgment forms.
This process of unravelling continues in Trauerspiel, a new performance that is organized by Kunstverein Schwerin and will be shown in the Perzina- Saal in June 2026, which Meyer is still developing as I write this. She tells me that she has been reading Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) for the piece — his account of baroque drama as a staging of history as decay and political crisis, populated not by heroic figures but by mortal, flawed, and grotesque ones. She has also been reading Margarete Mitscherlich’s The Inability to Mourn (1967), a psychoanalytic study of postwar German society and its repression of the Holocaust.
Together with actress Leila Grey, original sentences are combined with selected passages from both texts, distributed among four exaggerated characters. At one point, 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 within it.
I have not yet heard the piece. In June, I will travel to Schwerin to listen.
Moments of singing recur throughout Meyer’s works, and she often performs herself. During a residency at Berlin’s community radio station Cashmere Radio in 2023, Meyer researched the trobairitz, the female troubadours of twelfth- and thirteenth-century southern France. We spoke about it a lot, about these singers and poets who worked within a highly ritualized system of courtly love poetry originally structured by men. By adopting and simultaneously shifting existing forms, roles, and linguistic codes, they opened up new possibilities for female speaking positions.
Most of their work was destroyed during the Albigensian Crusade. In Meyer’s research notes, which she shared with me, I came across Roubaud: “song was born and killed.”
That Meyer keeps returning to them feels less like historical interest than like a question she keeps asking about her own practice: what does it mean for a voice to intervene in a predetermined discursive practice, or to try to refigure embodiments and subjectivity through linguistic experimental play?
The poet Lisa Robertson, who has also worked extensively on troubadour poetry, speaks of “augmented translation,”[1] a mode concerned less with fidelity to the original than with echo, mutation, and transformation, a recirculation of sound and meaning. One Meyer knows well — she introduced me to Robertson’s work.
Within Meyer’s practice, research and theory do not stay on the page. They become speech, sound, layering, repetition, fragmentation. They find a body. Translation, in this sense, appears less as a method than as a condition of the work itself: historical texts, voices, and forms of language are carried into contemporary spaces, where they begin to shift, resonate, and reappear differently.
I keep playing it back.
“language disables innocence in the world
as eggshells are meant to be broken.”
[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.
