Duho Pavilion Diary: Sound and Performance

Unveiled at Palm Heights in Grand Cayman earlier this summer, Open Palm presents the Duho Pavilion, a monumental landscape installation conceived by Limbo Accra. Alongside an exclusive short film shot for Something Curated, Limbo Accra’s Co-founder and Director Dominique Petit-Frère shares her insights on the thinking behind the installation’s inauguration in the second entry of the two-part series, Duho Pavilion Diary.

Inaugurating the Duho Pavilion was an experience that left me deeply moved, especially as it unfolded just a day before the unprecedented Category 5 Hurricane Beryl. The timing, amid the wild celebration of Cayman Carnival, felt both poignant and surreal. The pavilion’s launch was marked by a ceremonial sonic performance by Zion Estrada, a co-founder of Wild Grass Research Practice, which blurred the lines between land and performance.

Choreographer and founder of NoOne Art House, Chris Emile, activated the portal with an intimate movement performance. The live procession as performance was improvised on site, with a relational dynamic between Emile and Estrada that animated the practice of Spiritual Labor. Estrada’s live sound performance transformed found objects on the earth into instruments, while Emile’s spatial practice opened the Duho walkway with movement and mimicry within the land itself.

Set within the Duho Pavilion, Zion Estrada exhibited a three-channel immersive sonic installation exploring the role of sound in preserving lost, undocumented, and future memories. She applied the sonic work within the Duho as a fermentation process, layering the frequencies of the Neotropic landscape—capturing the tempo created by the natural and built, living and more-than-living, archival sounds, and elements of the Caymans. The artifact opens a portal of layered immersive sounds, architecting a sonic mangrove. The sound installation invites the listener to relate to the spirit of the island, transforming the Duho Pavilion into a place of worship and reflection.

The performance led visitors to a reading and reference room within the skeleton of the abandoned structure, featuring “Field Notes 001 – Posture, Transmission, Land – Grand Cayman” by Wild Grass Research Practice in collaboration with Library Fetish. By archiving field recordings from the island’s public and private life—its animals, vegetation, coastlines, vistas, public spaces, memories, and dreams—the work reflects the visible and invisible interconnected ecosystems of the Caymans.

The Field Notes 001 and sound installation is shaped by both historical and natural forces, honoring Taino deities, endangered endemic plant life, and the unrecorded stories of historical and future passersby.



Feature image: Chris Emile performs at the Duho Pavilion by Limbo Accra. Photo: Cat Morrison. Courtesy Open Palm / Palm Heights, Grand Cayman