The Soft Layer

What remains of a place when its past becomes its only future? Voices, memories, and stories come together to form a collective “soft layer” over a historic building—a poetic performance about perception, community, and the interplay of space and time.

This performance is a continuation of “The Soft Layer” (Tunis), a site-specific work that took place from 2017 to 2019 in the historic Dar Bairam Turki building in Tunis as part of “Dream City.” Over the course of several years, artist and set designer Jozef Wouters collected memories, stories, and ideas from local people who live and work around the building and its surroundings. In the courtyard, a group formed consisting of young architects, neighbors, actors, and a science fiction writer. Together, they undertook the renovation of the beautiful 17th-century Ottoman palace. It was a renovation of a different kind, in which nothing was removed but rather a layer was added—a soft and temporary layer of collective memories, stories, and opinions about the building. Part of the work was a text that transformed the building into a musical score, which was read at sunset as an act of care and as a collective meditation on a building. If the past is the only conceivable future, where are we now?

Two years later, following invitations to Palermo, Brussels, Ghent, and Ostend, Jozef Wouters continues to restage the text of “The Soft Layer” in various courtyards across different European cities. This time in Berlin, in the courtyard of HAU3: four local actors come together and, using the score created in Tunis, retell the story of the building and its renovation. In doing so, they explore the question of how much spaces, walls, and buildings remember—and what stories they can tell.

Jozef Wouters on the project’s origins:
“At the invitation of Dream City—the Biennale for Contemporary Art in Tunis—I moved into the historic building Dar Bairam Turki and asked the residents of the Medina what visions they had for this place. On one point, almost everyone seemed to agree: The future of the Medina and of Dar Bairam Turki is a restored version of itself. But which version of the past should we choose as our new future, and how do we make that choice? If the only conceivable future is the past, where are we now?
Together with Vladimir Miller, I gathered these contradictory ideas surrounding restoration in a process that added layers to this building rather than stripping them away. Together with the Tunisian artists Amira Chebli, Hichem Chebli, and Fatma Ben Saïdane, we staged this ephemeral “Soft Layer” performance to temporarily restore the collective stories, imaginations, and visions that make up the nostalgic terrain of architecture. By adding layers, stories, copies, and visions to the courtyard of Dar Bairam Turki, we asked ourselves how many versions of itself a building can contain before it collapses.”