Connective Tissue

My mother, very lovingly, once called me „ein klebriges Bonbon“. Caramel candy – sweet, but sticky. The kind that tastes like memory, but stays on your fingers and glues itself to your teeth. It’s true, I fear change. I’ve often found myself holding on for too long, reluctant to let go, but almost stubbornly clinging on to what is. Jobs, habits, or relationships... I’ve stayed on paved paths, merely to avoid life’s ruptures, to evade pain and discomfort, … or void. 

And yet, there is an eerie beauty in the spaces between, where the self flickers like a shadow cast by a forgotten light. When the familiar becomes strange, when identity shifts in and out of focus, when life’s ruptures awaken questions that only grow louder, we are compelled to confront the distance between who we were, who we are, and who we might yet become. Though these feelings may seem so personal, such moments are far from solitary – a loop of emotion, resonating in a pattern of shared experience.

In these times of uncertainty, when reality feels both intimate and distant, the invisible threads that bind us emerge. An intricate, often unseen network spans the spaces between our thoughts, memories, and perceptions. Like the body’s connective tissue – fragile yet resilient, creating a delicate architecture that holds us together – these threads weave the boundaries of identity and self. They are not static; they stretch, bend, break, and transform. Never fixed, always present. 

They suggest that our connections to ourselves and surroundings are as mutable as the bonds between all things – ever adjusting to life’s motion.

Connective Tissue explores the complex, often ineffable nature of these connections. Within the work, elements are allowed to exist where they “should not”: plants in bathtubs, showers that refuse to become rain, circular forms opening like impossible portals. Textures echo yet resist alignment. 

These disjunctions are not errors but openings – glimpses of estrangement that expose how meaning is constructed, how the world coheres through interpretation and how identity emerges from the imperfect and unsteady – not the fixed, but formed by how we relate to and make sense of the unexpected or misplaced parts of our life. 

Time flows through the work as a central force: not linear, but circular, fragmented, and elusive. It unfolds with a return to play – a visit to a playground, where the body lifts in suspended arcs. The swing becomes a portal, a moment when gravity loosens and time slips.

From these physical gestures, new terrains emerge. Shaped through hand-built sets, we are drawn into alien mise-en-scènes where memory is displaced and identity recontextualized. These transformations raise questions about how interference mediates not only our imagination of the future but also our inhabitation of the present – blurring the line between connection and detachment, attention and distraction. In quieter moments, the work gathers traces of time, preserving the residue of passing instants. These fragments speak to the in-between – the unnoticed pauses where meaning collects and dissipates. Personal histories recur, folding time back upon itself: family photographs, a passed-down dollhouse, the uncanny repetition of ancestral and domestic patterns across generations and borders. These echoes are not mere nostalgia; they suggest that identity is formed in spirals, always circling, revisiting, and reconfiguring. 

The palette offers little grey, and this absence raises a question about the work itself: does it demand clarity, reveal impatience, or simply reflect on how rarely the lived experience of becoming rests in neutrality? By refusing softness, the work invites us to consider whether we can inhabit a world of half-answers, or if meaning is always forged at the threshold of contrast – circling, revisiting, reshaping within the friction of what was, what is, what could be.

Connective Tissue reflects on life’s ruptures, tracing patterns of connection that persist beyond the self. In quiet tension these unseen threads reveal themselves – mysterious and tender – they are holding us together, even as we come undone.