Liminal Warehouse

Where Dreams and Wakefulness Fold Into Each Other

Student: Merve Özcan

This project is a large-scale immersive performance environment situated within a 2,000 m² warehouse, conceived as a spatial and narrative apparatus that explores coexistence, agency, and the instability of reality. The work translates a science-fiction narrative about “effective dreams” into a hybrid architectural, performative, and virtual experience, where physical and digital realms continuously overlap.

Visitors enter through a reception zone containing a bar and cloakroom, before moving into the primary performance space defined by layered curtains and shifting thresholds. The dominant spatial condition is a circular stage at the center, surrounded by dispersed stations of varying scales: a gathering area composed of screens, and a VR station where incomplete physical objects await narrative completion through the digital world. Each station offers a distinct mode of participation, ensuring that virtual participants, physical visitors, and performers all experience the work differently.

At the beginning of the performance, curtains descend from above, isolating the circular arena and obscuring peripheral contexts. The audience settles onto a topographic seating structure embedded among architectural models resembling fragmented cityscapes. There is no linear seating arrangement; instead, spectators occupy staggered positions that blur distinctions between observer, participant, and performer. The performers inhabit a lower, multi-level stage, establishing a constantly shifting power relationship between center and periphery.

Throughout the performance, a dreamlike universe is projected onto circular screens, visually overlapping with the performers’ physical presence from nearly every angle. Kinetic objects descend from above, mediating between the virtual narrative and the tangible space. A lightweight, semi-transparent shell constructed from wood, fabric, and light encloses the performers and gradually expands outward through a kinetic structure, altering spatial boundaries and engulfing the audience.

Sound, light, and atmosphere continuously reconfigure the environment: audio emerges from buildings, objects, the stage, and the room itself. These transformations serve the project’s central question, how difficult it is to coexist. The work invites reflection on positioning, consumption, activity versus passivity, and the ways societal, political, ecological, and economic structures are normalized and left unquestioned through repetition.