“We live in a country in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up” 1
Every lullaby carries tension: while it soothes a child from reality to sleep, it also begins to outline the shape of their dreams. What happens when the softest gestures - like lullabies that comfort, spaces that shelter- calcify into barriers?
This exhibition reimagines a school’s garage as a liminal space between home and institution, between the intimate and the public. Originally designed for storage and utility, it now embodies both the physical and emotional act of sealing: to protect, to preserve, to enclose. We approach the structure playfully, creating another layer of membrane that traps the soft residue of lullabies. In this neighborhood where Brooklyn’s industrial past lies buried and sealed beneath the surface, life continues to flourish above. The contaminated ground beneath holds toxic histories, the ground above—school, garage, children—builds layers of a future. This double sealing creates tension between care and containment, safety and structure.
The exhibition presents both sealing and revealing, yet it is not silent. It holds echoes of care, traces of protection, and the fragile architecture of dreams. Here, infrastructures of survival become instruments of play. Sounds of protection become architecture. Lullabies become walls – not to divide, but to hold, to carry and to remember.
“The dark things of the unknown world draw near to man, those growths and diminutions in a murky thickness, those floating of forms in the shadows, all that mystery which we call dream and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality.” 2
1 James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption< As Much Truth As One Can Bear>, 1962
2 Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea, 1866
