As the oldest concert hall building in Berlin, you’d assume Maxim Gorki Theater has seen its fair share of transformations. But its latest incarnation as a ‘living organism’ isn’t what anyone expected. New artistic director Çağla Ilk has invited transdisciplinary artist and researcher Nicole L’Huillier to explore the acoustics of Gorki, to further understand how it’s shaped by voices, people and the city surrounding it. In reality, this means engaging with its stone facades and soft interiors “as a soft, elastic and vibrational second skin” and tuning into its unheard vibration using interactive devices and choreography. L’Huillier excels in this conceptual-sonic-installation-performance format. Originally from Santiago, Chile and now based in Berlin, she has shown her work at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia and Transmediale. Her sonic/vibrational sculptures, listening apparatus and interactive instruments are easily identifiable by their bright, bold and naive forms that blend playful kitsch with scientific research. Membrana continues L’Huillier’s practice as “a conceptual apparatus, organisational model structure and resonant framework for tuning into our vibrational reality”. We spoke to L’Huillier ahead of the opening of Membrana for a quick vibe check.
Gorki’s new artistic director, Çağla Ilk, wants us to start understanding the theatre, not as a closed concept, but as a living organism. How does that resonate with you?
This resonates deeply. It’s essentially how I think about any structure I work with. I approach the places I work with, not as fixed containers, but as dynamic fields of relations, as bodies that vibrate, listen and respond. The membranes I create are exactly this; they’re vibrant oscillatory thresholds that mediate rather than separate, carrying sound, pressure and presence back and forth. If theatre is an organism rather than a closed concept, it has skin, ears, a pulse. So voices, crafts, memories and futures aren’t just content inside the building; they’re vibrational forces that move through it and dynamically shape it.
What elements of the building are you particularly excited to engage with and why?
I believe that every architectural structure behaves like a resonant membrane. But there’s a tendency to perceive these structures as dormant and rigid; they aren’t. The façade of a building is a sensitive and porous skin, a vibrational system of giving and receiving. With my intervention, I’m highlighting this vibrational threshold and turning it into a resonant portal of confluences and interferences. Instead of focusing on the theatre as an inward ‘on stage’ event, I want to turn its skin inside out and soften its boundaries. So the theatre can also exist in an open, chaotic, relational mesh with the city, with the public space, with people, insects, animals and wind passing by, with the energies, noises and chants of everyday life.
How did you arrive at the title Membrana? And how do you define it?
If we truly listen, if we pay attention to these sonic encounters and vibrational languages, maybe we can confabulate stronger social membranes together.
‘Membrana’ a recurrent word that accompanies me and has been present in my work in various forms. For the installation at Gorki, it just couldn’t be anything else. Membrana grows out of a practice I’ve developed for years around ‘La Membrane’, a conceptual apparatus, organisational model structure and resonant framework for tuning into our vibrational reality. A membrane, like an eardrum or skin, is a resonant porous border: it connects and separates at once, a dynamic threshold activated by vibrations, an oscillatory territory. For Gorki, the title isn’t a metaphor; it’s quite literal. I’m proposing to reconceive the building’s own boundaries, its façade, curtains, walls, as membranes: structures that don’t just enclose space, but transmit and receive it. It highlights the border of the building as a sensitive skin, as a responsive entity and energetic transducer that lives in a timeless vibrational exchange.
I’m interested to hear which mediums you’ll engage with. Will this work include performance and bodies too?
Actually, the piece is a durational, ongoing performance. Membrana is a sound installation that proposes a large silicone membrane with contact microphones embedded; it becomes a ‘contact membrane’, what I call a ‘vibrational membrane microphone’. It lies on the façade as a second skin. This sensitive, large-scale sculptural organ/device is a responsive entity that mediates and participates in a continuous call-and-response with the sounds around it. It listens. And as it receives sounds, it emits responses in real time. So it has a life of its own. As a living, open score, it sets an ongoing improvisation session. I’m very excited because, as part of the installation, choreographer Constanza Macras is developing a performance with dancers from her company Dorky Park to activate the work and relate to it as another performer. This will be freely accessible because it will happen outside, so this membrane is really reformulating the boundaries of the theatre. So it can overflow itself and open up to the city, reframing its borders and, with them, the scope of the stage, performers and audience into new arrangements.
Your work has a strong visual identity that’s easily definable. How will you incorporate this visual aesthetic into the classical Gorki architecture?
I would say that in some ways, my intervention is quite minimal. Which is a weird thing to say for a large, responsive and durational piece. But this membrane is in continuity and not in rupture with the building’s façade. I propose it as a soft, elastic and vibrational second skin. It’s translucent, so it isn’t opaque to the life inside the building, and it falls on the façade, matching the hue of the building, as if its walls had softened or were on the verge of an elastic transformation. So it is, in many ways, an architectural system that couples with the façade and proposes, from within, a new relationship to the vibrations around it. The façade installation will also be accompanied by instruments to activate it, whether by the performers or the audience/visitors passing by. These instruments are based on megaphones so people can project their voices towards Membrana. These instruments will carry a bit more of my unhinged, symbolic and playful palette of shapes and bright colours.
Maxim Gorki Theater has experienced many changes throughout its long and turbulent history. What do you hope your artistic proposition will add to its legacy?
This is a moment of multiple transformations, layering on the many stories that constitute this place. I hope the installation invites more elastic, resonant ways of being and thinking. If we truly listen, if we pay attention to these sonic encounters and vibrational languages, maybe we can confabulate stronger social membranes together. This isn’t about layering something new on top to hide what’s there. It’s the opposite: an opening up. To become resonant and porous is to reveal the contact points that already exist, and to remember that any real conversation starts with listening. I want this place to listen attentively and connect outward, into life. One of the fundamentals of improvisation is listening to each other so we can emerge together. I feel like in these troubled times, we really need to practice listening as a playful way of togetherness. That feels to me like a fitting task for a place like Gorki, that it becomes a place for practicing and confabulating new arrangements. It is not a dormant monument, but a resonant structure still willing to improvise. Life, after all, is an ongoing jam session.
Membrana opens on Oct 9 at Maxim Gorki Theater. More details here.
