Nicola L.: Nous Voulons Entendre

Frieze Projects: Against the Edge
Curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan & Del Vaz Projects

February 13, 15, 17, & 18, 10am—1:45pm
Visits on appointment only. Book a visit here. 

​“My body is made of the same flesh as the world...and moreover this flesh of my body is shared with the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world.” — Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 1968

Thomas Mann moved to Los Angeles via Princeton in 1941, having fled Nazi Germany. Before commissioning his new home in Santa Monica, Mann toured California modernist buildings in 1938 with Richard Neutra, ultimately selecting the Berlin-born, German-Jewish architect Julius Ralph Davidson to design his family’s home. Throughout the war, Mann would record his anti-Nazi messages from the home’s study, which were broadcast by the BBC to people in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the occupied Netherlands and Czechoslovakia

Nicola L., took to the streets with students and factory workers in the May 68 demonstrations, making a series of Penetrable protest banners. These banners were punctuated with entries for five to ten heads, with slogans such as WE WANT TO TOUCH, WE WANT TO SEE, WE WANT TO FEEL, WE WANT TO LOVE,and WE WANT TO BE LOVED stenciled across them. On view at the Thomas Mann House is an example of one of these banners with nine head-Penetrables and the phrase NOUS VOULONS ENTENDRE, or, WE WANT TO HEAR, this work resounds with Mann’s broadcasts, each of which began with the words “Germans, Listen!”