In cooperation with Fotografiska and the St Barth Ile d’Art cultural association the musée territorial du Wall House is pleased to present the first exhibition in the Caribbean by the artistic duo Cooper & Gorfer.
Through a series of powerful works combining photography, collage, and visual construction, the exhibition explores questions that have become essential: — What do we keep close to us? — Where does our secret place of belonging reside? — If we had to leave everything behind: who would we be?
Wars, climate disasters, forced migrations: never have human tragedies been so visible or so pervasive. Faced with this fragmented world, one waiting danger lies for us: to stop imagining a possible future.
Struck by this realization—and by the loss of a collective utopia—Cooper & Gorfer turned toward their local communities. They spoke with young women whose lives had been upended by exile, asking them to talk about their dreams, their identity, and the hidden places of their belonging. The resulting portraits do not seek to illustrate suffering, but to restore dignity, history, and power to those who have had to begin again elsewhere.
Between These Folded Walls, Utopia is both a political reflection and a poetic construction.
The two artists envision a utopian theatre, a visual world where the boundaries between reality and imagination dissolve. The protagonists—young women from this new global diaspora—are portrayed as mythological heroines. Cooper & Gorfer’s works layer imaginary architectures, elements of nature, the sitters’ personal objects, and multiple artistic media to create a labyrinthine world, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the universes of Borges, where each setting can be destroyed and rebuilt—like the identities of these women in motion.
Nothing is fixed: everything can be reinvented.
The exhibition thus offers a contemporary perspective on memory, migration, and hope—a message of striking relevance today.
Sarah Cooper (United States, 1974) and Nina Gorfer (Austria, 1979) have collaborated since 2006. Based in Gothenburg, Sweden, they have developed a distinctive visual language blending narrative, photography, collage, and painterly staging. Between These Folded Walls, Utopia is their sixth series.