Walls Wide Open

WALLS WIDE OPEN

2025, multichannel video installation

Artistic/movement direction, sound composition: Christopher Loy

Performance, choreography, movement direction: Black Pearl de Almeida Lima

Parts of the work were directly and indirectly developed within a workshop with LI staff by Raphael Jacobs

Dramaturgic awareness consultation: Dream Nwattu

Director of photography, camera: Priyanka Sarkar

Gaffer: Anastasiya Plotnikova

Set assistance: Jaycee Hernandez


WALLS WIDE OPEN captures performances by Black Pearl, a Brazilian trans woman, dancer and Ballroom performer, staged across seven metaphorical locations within the historic main building of the Hamburg State Teachers’ Institute (LI) and its adjacent new building.

Engaging with the history and institutional framework of LI, each location reflects on different contemporary concepts of knowledge, its transmission and preservation, and the relationship between bodies and architecture. The different spatial situations are informed by specific references to contemporary artistic positions, carefully linking the architecture of LI to broader questions of visibility, embodiment, institutional memory and projection. These references expand the work beyond the immediate site while remaining embedded within its spatial logic. Through movement, gesture and spatial intervention, WALLS WIDE OPEN searches for a physicality of knowledge while focusing on gaps, absences and invisible histories embedded within the institution.

C-Touch screen on the middle of the stage of cleared LI Hamburg auditorium with curtains just opened enough to reveal the screen. The screen shows image of performer Black Pearl de Almeida Lima in close-up shot looking into the camera, filmed in front of the curtains of the very stage the screen is standing on.

Left and right: installation view within Performative Symposium,
© Claudia Höhne, 2025

A side stepped platform is standing in the middle, in the background a close up of a female dancer is projected on a rastered wall of an empty auditorium.

Both images: installation view within Performative Symposium,
© Claudia Höhne, 2025

In WALLS WIDE OPEN, Black Pearl appears as a performer within filmed spatial situations and as a virtual performer within the broader installation and symposium context. The work shifts between embodied presence in front of the camera and mediated presence within projected and architecturally distributed viewing situations. Through this double positioning, performance is not bound to a single site or body, but circulates between lived action, cinematic capture and spatial transmission.

Approaching the building through acts of mirroring, projection and reflection, the work integrates the technologies of production and display — cameras, screens and projectors — as active performative agents. Lens-based media become tools of translation, exposing discontinuities within historical narratives and the systematically rendered invisibility of marginalized bodies.

Conceived both as a cinematic work and a spatial installation, WALLS WIDE OPEN creates a dialogue between filmed space and exhibition space. A sculptural interface allows audiences to shift between different camera perspectives and performative situations, while the auditorium itself functions simultaneously as projection space and filming location. As an installation, the work translates space and movement into image and back into spatial experience.

  • Projection on a rastered auditorium wall showing a female dancer moving rolling library shelves at night.
    Stills from documentation video of Performative Symposium, 2025
    Camera: Priyanka Sarkar, Fiona Ahrens

Duration, variable, on loop, spatial audio, multichannel video, 2025
Commissioned by LI Hamburg, as part of Performative Symposium