I visualized the archiving and ordering of a system in which we are all embedded and trapped. During a performance at the Volume Gallery in Berlin, I removed all books from the gallery’s bookshelf and cut holes in the shelves for my own body. I stayed there for over four hours as a living archive of knowledge during the opening and the following days.

What kind of knowledge archive would that be? In this piece, I am dealing with the systematically acquired knowledge that everyone automatically absorbs as a child and then takes on as an adult—like a reflex, given and unquestioned. There is an infinite amount of knowledge in books that everyone, at least in certain situations, should better examine to determine if it suits their own life and their own view of the world.

As life’s perception is not a given but a learned practice, involving an active construction of the world, any resemblance to reality is an effect generated by the interplay between the expected and the unexpected. Analogies, metaphors, and symbols are the strings that keep one’s mind connected to the world, Hannah Arendt said. With the performance of “Reflex,” I investigate these strings not only as connections of human experiences but also as strategies for stabilization.

The title of the work refers to the English and German word “Reflex”—a spontaneous and instinctive response to a stimulus which is firmly established in our human awareness and our body. “Reflex” then no longer means a given practice, but an action where human impulses can offer a new constellation of power relations. The work questions the complex triangle of public space, individual, and society, and completely unfolds this triangle into a straight and open line where things can be arranged in a new way.