Flutter #001 - #009, 2025 (ongoing)
Flutter #001, 2025, various pencils on paper, 30 × 30 cm
Flutter #002, 2025, various pencils on paper, 30 × 30 cm
Flutter #003, 2025, various pencils on paper, 30 × 30 cm
Flutter #004, 2025, various pencils on paper, 30 × 30 cm
Flutter #005, 2025, various pencils on paper, 30 × 30 cm
Flutter #006, 2025, various pencils on paper, 30 × 30 cm
Flutter #007, 2025, various pencils on paper, 30 × 30 cm
Flutter #008, 2025, various pencils on paper, 30 × 30 cm
Flutter #009, 2025, various pencils on paper, 30 × 30
While everything was blooming and returning to life last spring, I found myself in a state of deep depression. There was a dissonance between the vitality of the world around me and my own inner stillness. During this time, two things became anchors: music and nature. They offered rhythm, presence, and a sense of continuity when everything else felt unreachable. From their quiet convergence, this series of drawings began to take shape. Using simple strokes and reduced forms, almost childlike, glitched flowers emerged. The drawing process itself became a physical and emotional gesture, a way of translating sound, breath, and observation into movement on paper. The lines resemble a heartbeat—expanding across the square surface, filling it, testing its edges. There is a subtle tension between containment and release, between stillness and growth. Each drawing becomes a small act of return: a quiet assertion of life, unfolding slowly, and reaching outward beyond its own limits.
inappropriate poems about fuckboys is a series of lyrical texts examining moments before, after and during sexual encounters. Drawing on reflections of personal experiences and memories, it explores the boundaries of “intimacy without commitment”, the phenomenon of emotionally unavailable men, the probing of needs and conditions, the structure and progression of such encounters, as well as the potential for dependency and obsession inherent in fast and fleeting sex.
I can take deep breaths, speaking under water., embroidered towels, towel holders, 50 × 90 cm, detail, 2025, photo credits Elia Schmid
I can take deep breaths, speaking under water., embroidered towels, towel holders, 50 × 90 cm, detail, 2024, photo credits: Jan Hottmann
I can take deep breaths, speaking under water., embroidered towels, towel holders, 50 × 90 cm, exhibition view BB Stiftung Stuttgart, 2025, photo credits: Elia Schmid
What limits exist within our communication and its inherent strategies? How much can we comprehend and take in from the other person, but also from ourselves? Thus, alongside the difficulty of expressing ourselves correctly through language and of being heard and understood by others, there is the inability to carry our innermost sensations outward. How much of these intimate feelings do we wish to reveal—what depth can emerge, what closeness do we want to allow?
Pierre Turquet (1913–1975), a psychiatrist whose particular interest lay in relationships within a group, observed that participants in group therapy leave behind feelings of loneliness and anonymity and become subjects—that is, acting persons within the room—by making contact with other participants through gestures, glances, or words.¹ But what happens if this never occurs? If the subject never manages to overcome the state of loneliness, cannot enter into exchange or share sensations because it reaches the limits of communication? How does the individual move through space after failed communication? How does it deal with the resulting emptiness, with the experienced loneliness?
The installation echoes travelling off from the centre like... is oriented toward the setting of a group therapy session. Seven chairs stand in a circle; loudly, a recurring sentence can be heard: “I am lonely.” Almost plaintively, it asks for contact and attention. Through headphones, on each chair the same voice tells a different sequence of a person’s experienced loneliness. The missing other voices and the unoccupied chairs underscore the absence of a counterpart—any communication dissipates into emptiness. Only the visitors can fill this void and take on the role of the other. Yet each person sits alone and is exposed to an individual narrative. No one hears the same thing; no one shares the same experience. How, then, can communication still take place and how can people respond to one another?
The format of group therapy is almost an illusion. It stands as a proxy for our social relationships and patterns of relating; it can convey feelings of belonging and acceptance and serves as a space for practice and experimentation. In the best case, a learning effect occurs. What has been learned and possibly healed, however, must first be integrated into real life, into our existing relationships, and also be accepted there. Only then can healing truly take place. The speaking subject in the room has not yet dared to take this step. It is stuck, circling around itself, trapped in a loop.
¹ Cf. Anzieu, D.: Das Haut-Ich. Frankfurt am Main, 1996, p. 46. Cited after Turquet, P. M.: “Menaces à l’identité personnelle dans le groupe large,” in: Bulletin Psychologique, special issue Groupes: Psychologie sociale et psychanalyse, n.p., pp. 135–158.
Über den Wolken, 2024, video stills
Über den Wolken, video, branch, iphone, wood, towelling, sound, exhibition view, Kulturbunker Stuttgart, 2024, photo credits: Johannes Ocker
Über den Wolken, video, branch, iphone, wood, towelling, sound, exhibition view, Kulturbunker Stuttgart, 2024, photo credits: Johannes Ocker
Über den Wolken, video, branch, iphone, wood, towelling, sound, exhibition view, Kulturbunker Stuttgart, 2024, photo credits: Johannes Ocker
In the site specific installation Über den Wolken visitors are invited to take a seat on a bench covered with white terry cloth and to look at a cracked iPhone display attached to a branch. On the screen, a looping avalanche rolls by in slow motion. The avalanche serves as the central motif of the work and merges two levels: the nature footage, whose aesthetic could also run in the background of “stress relief videos” to evoke the feelings of longing and calmness, and the acute mortal danger posed by this natural force, which activates one of the oldest protective functions of our brainstem: fight, flight, or freeze.
The object itself also takes up a contrast: the implied stability of a wooden bench, often found at scenic viewpoints during hikes, and the softness of the terry cloth, which evokes the picture of a light blanket of snow while simultaneously fulfilling the function of a towel—absorbing moisture (e.g., stress sweat). The exhibition space is located in a former civil defense bunker—a space whose cool, confined atmosphere is further intensified by the clinical mint green of the walls and a throbbing sound. The boundaries between a safe place of retreat and a potential disaster zone become blurred. It remains unclear whether one is inside the avalanche or merely an observer of an abandoned scene.
I am shielded in my armour, hiding in my room, save within my womb., PVC, transparent paper, screws, 10,5 × 18 cm, detail, Kulturbunker Stuttgart, 2024, photo credits: Johannes Ocker
I am shielded in my armour, hiding in my room, save within my womb., PVC, transparent paper, screws, 10,5 × 18 cm, detail, Kulturbunker Stuttgart, 2024, photo credits: Johannes Ocker
I am shielded in my armour, hiding in my room, save within my womb., PVC, transparent paper, screws, 10,5 × 18 cm, detail, Kulturbunker Stuttgart, 2024, photo credits: Johannes Ocker
I am shielded in my armour, hiding in my room, save within my womb., PVC, transparent paper, screws, 10,5 × 18 cm, exhibition view, Kulturbunker Stuttgart, 2024, photo credits: Johannes Ocker
Three layers stacked on top of each other – red PVC, transparent paper with drawings, and another transparent paper printed with text – show different phases of shame: from the physical reaction of blushing to the release of the messenger substance TNF-a, to the psychological reactions. TNF-a, known as tumor necrosis factor-alpha, is released during inflammatory-like diseases and causes people to want to rest and withdraw after an infection. A 2004 study shows that TNF-a is also released during shame and promotes the desire for isolation and protection. If this desire remains unfulfilled, we increasingly fall into isolation and emotional numbness.
Vicinity of Obscenity, w/
Clarissa Kassai, Hendrik Jaich, Leonie Klöpfer, Lea Mina Rossatti, Daniel Frey, Benedikt Waldmann, 2023
Vicinity of Obscenity, 2023, video stills
Vicinity of Obscenity, 2-channel mixed media video installation, 4 × 2 × 2,20 m, exhibition views, ABK Stuttgart, 2023, photo credits: Johannes Ocker
A highly abstracted subway car as a fleeting place of encounter and the resulting forced intimacy forms the scenario of this work. On the windows, close-up shots of snails can be seen slowly moving forward on the supposed pane. The swirling sound, consisting of clicking and smacking noises, combined with a swelling and subsiding bass makes the seats vibrate among the visitors. Thighs stick to the latex fabric. The people sitting opposite each other look over their heads at the projections, whose mood oscillates between peaceful and threatening, sensual and repulsive. However, the role of the viewer is not fixed, which becomes obvious when the gaze drifts from the screen and intersects with another. Visitors become viewers of themselves, not just the projection is shown, but also the reaction of the other person. The carriages fill and empty continuously, people make room, and there are touches when you have to push past the solitary pole in the room. The space, in its connotation as a fleeting place of encounter in public space, is recontextualized and reimagined, and visitors are made aware that they too can become the observed object at any moment from the observing subject.
Text: Benedikt Waldmann
Durst, 2023
Durst, 2023, photography
what doesn't kill me still hurts, porcelain, magnet, dimensions variable, edition of 100 pieces, exhibition view, Hotel Central Stuttgart, 2024
what doesn't kill me still hurts, porcelain, magnet, dimensions variable, edition of 100 pieces
what doesn't kill me still hurts tells about our constant drive for self-improvement and performance through an empty porcelain pill blister. The promise of healing or change/improvement through the consumption of the pill is called into question by the fragility of the chosen material. The title refers to Nietzsche's "What does not kill me makes me stronger," but criticizes the conclusion: for every wound hurts and leaves scars, changes, deforms, and shapes us.
leftovers, 2020 (ongoing), photographies
what is home? baby don’t hurt me, 2019