Susan Philipsz — We are the weavers, 2026

“We are the Canuts, we are naked”. Drawn from Le Chant des Canuts, a nineteenth-century protest song associated with Lyon’s silk workers, this refrain sounds simultaneously from a series of traboules, Lyon’s historic network of passageways, and the garden of the Musée des Beaux-Arts. Here, Susan Philipsz intertwines it with two other songs, I Hear Thunder and Pop Goes the Weasel, creating a polyphonic composition that reverberates through the former cloister. Every vocal part is sung by Philipsz herself in what she describes as a “song sculpture”. Heard across the different sites, her voice links places and histories throughout the city, giving presence to lives and forms of labour no longer visible. The work traces the routes once taken by Lyon’s silk workers from the workshops of Croix-Rousse to the merchants and river below, its sound echoing through the passages that continue to connect different areas of the city.

Susan Philipsz’s practice is closely attuned to space, each work conceived in dialogue with the specific context of its presentation. Sound is her primary medium, approached as a sculptural form that brings into relation the bodies of the viewer, architecture, and the layers of history that traverse them. Grounded in research, her work unfolds through sound compositions that combine music and song, voice, archival recordings and a play of repetition and silence. Attentive to themes of absence, loss, memory and hope, Philipsz mobilises sound for its emotional and psychological resonance.