Nicole L’HuillierMembrana

We are all ears. A good relationship begins with listening: perceiving what is already there before responding. But listening is never passive. To listen is to be affected and, in turn, to affect our surroundings. What if a theater were to listen in this way?

This autumn, Berlin-based Chilean artist Nicole L’Huillier transforms the Gorki into a listening body. For the Palais am Festungsgraben, she is developing Membrana: a monumental membrane sculpture. A vast, translucent surface stretches across the façade like a second skin. The building is no longer merely a shell in which something happens; it becomes an active participant in the event. Architecture turns into a resonant body, and its façade into an immense eardrum.

Membrana grows out of L’Huillier’s long-term artistic research. Trained as an architect, she understands space not as something fixed, but as a field of relationships in which bodies, materials, energies, and histories continuously affect each other. In her practice, membranes have appeared as ears, flags, sound systems, instruments, and lifelike beings. They form both a material and a conceptual apparatus through which she investigates how sound travels, how encounters emerge, and how seemingly separate worlds can be woven together.

For L’Huillier, a membrane is not a rigid wall. It is an oscillating border that simultaneously receives and transmits. There can be no sending without receiving, no call without a response. At the Palais, this membranal logic expands to the scale of architecture. The background noise of the street, passing voices and the movements of the city meet the sculpture and are transduced into sonic vibrations. Noises in the present mingle with the echoes and memories held within the building. Inside and outside, street and theater, city and institution, past and present become part of one resonant system.

Anyone passing the Palais can see, hear, and feel the work. Yet Membrana does not simply represent openness, nor is it intended to conceal, protect, or seal off. It acts as a conceptual disturbance: a soft but insistent invitation to reconsider the familiar boundaries, rituals, and assumptions of institutional practice. What would it mean for a theater not only to address the city, but also to receive it—to allow itself to be changed by what it hears?

During the freely accessible opening hours, the sculpture is activated through a performance specially developed for it by choreographer Constanza Macras. Dancers from the Dorky Park company encounter Membrana not as a backdrop, but as a partner and protagonist. They respond to its movements, oscillations, and sounds, while their own bodies become part of the composition. The sculpture listens and responds; the performers send and receive; visitors enter the same system of calls, echoes, and feedback.

In this encounter, the distinction between artwork, architecture, performer, and audience begins to shift. Membrana becomes more than art integrated into a building: it opens a permeable interface between theater and city, between human and non-human bodies, and between visible and invisible forms of presence. The theater listens with its whole body.