The Orchids’ Lament is a literary audio walk where 14 orchids await on the windowsills of homes in the Grund and Clausen neighborhoods, inviting you to listen.

Come and listen at the windowsills of 14 houses. Fourteen stories about orchids will be revealed to you, like so many intimate mini-gardens.

We shall find the most perfect and most harmonious manifestations of plant intelligence among the orchids. In these strange and convoluted flowers, the genius of the plant attains its highest point and with an unusual brilliance pierces the wall that divides the kingdoms.

Maurice Maeterlinck, The Intelligence of Flowers, 1907.

The Orchids’ Lament is an intimate journey into nature, the city, and its inhabitants. These are 14 tales of orchids placed on the windowsills of homes; like tiny intimate gardens, like nature-altars set to tell of the world, they reveal themselves along the Alzette and Petrusse valleys.

Orchids are the sentinels of our homes, our spectators. They see and hear everything. Inside and out. Like us, they are alive. Today we invite you to listen to them, to observe them. These orchids speak, and they have stories to tell. They are from here and from elsewhere. They respond to the world around them, resilient yet always alert to the climatic and social upheavals of our time.

This project aims to shift our gaze to what usually goes unseen, onto the intimate territory of the city and the living world. We are offering you a sensory voyage where observing and listening to these stories invites us to understand and to dream that all life forms have their stories.

A walking route that will transform the way you walk through the city and perceive nature, making it fully alive.

“One day as I walked on the street, I was drawn to an orchid on a windowsill. I continued on my way and I saw another. For the first time, I paid attention to them. I realized that there were so many decorating the city’s windows. I settled in front of one that rose up proudly in her plastic pot and I enjoyed imagining her speaking to me and telling me her story…” Sophie Langevin

13 authors and one videographer were thus called to write short stories, of a duration of 3 to 6 minutes. They come from Luxembourg, France, Belgium, and the Middle East, and they have slipped into the skin of an orchid to transport us into their universe.