A System in Operation

In the exhibition space, a thermal printer is installed at a height of about two meters. The device operates at irregular intervals: phases of activity alternate with phases of silence, and occasionally longer interruptions occur. When it prints, a single sentence appears repeatedly: “environmentally friendly”. The paper leaves the printer as a continuous trace and falls into the space. What initially appears as a single strip develops into a mass.

The work makes use of existing elements of the exhibition space. A flat file cabinet from the estate of a composer serves as a storage unit for one hundred rolls of thermal paper. During the printing phase, a fixed counter becomes the artist’s workstation. Behind the counter, empty plastic cartridges from the used rolls accumulate on wall shelves. With every paper change, not only does the amount of paper on the floor grow, but also the archive of the remaining casings.

The work unfolds over the first two weeks of the exhibition as an ongoing process. During this time, the printing is maintained through daily interventions. New paper rolls are inserted, used cartridges are archived, and each new roll is sewn to the previous one immediately after being changed. Red threads create connections between individual sections, retrospectively forming the printing process into a single body.

The process has no natural conclusion. Its end is determined only by the external limit of the exhibition. The rhythm of the printing also resists clear predictability: the underlying program makes its own decisions.

Over time, the work leaves additional traces. Stepping on the paper produces imprints, necessary interventions inscribe themselves into the material, and every act of maintenance changes the state of the system.

After the printing process ends, the material remains in the space. On the final day of the exhibition, the paper strip that has been sewn together over weeks is condensed into an object. From a process designed for continuation, a form emerges retrospectively: not as the goal of its development, but as its temporary interruption.

The Labyrinth as Method

Art is not a pure representation of the world. It is a form of constructing experience. It does not produce images in order to show something, but structures in which something can take place. The work is therefore less an object than an arrangement of relations: between space and time, between perception and memory, between the artistic work and the person who enters into it. And this entering is not accidental.

Art organizes movement: quietly, but precisely. It sets rhythms, delays and deviations; it shifts attention. One possible figure for this is the labyrinth. The labyrinth is not a place of getting lost, but a structure in which losing oneself becomes a method. A work that operates as a labyrinth does not fix meaning and does not offer it as a finished form. Rather, it opens an entry point and lets everything else emerge through the movement that unfolds with the person who enters it. In this way, the work becomes a generator of a state in which understanding is not communicated, but formed: through duration, return and detours. This experience is fragmentary, contradictory and permeated by repetition: elements return, shift, take on other meanings and enter new networks.

Here, art does not work with finished content, but with material: images, texts, sounds, bodies, spaces. This material does not serve representation. It serves the creation of relationships within which experience becomes possible. Often, art begins precisely where material loses its original function: when an image no longer documents, when a text no longer explains, when an object no longer serves, a space opens in which other meanings become possible. This space is not neutral. Every decision — arrangement, rupture, repetition, displacement — shapes the movement within the space. The work becomes a precise configuration of conditions under which experience can arise. In this context, the personal also loses its status as interiority. It does not become a confession, but a raw material among others, whose value lies less in sincerity than in its ability to expose structures.

Yet every structure also produces its own boundary. What opens possibilities also limits them. Repetition can generate insight, or tip into a form of stagnation. A system that remains stable for too long begins to reproduce itself. At this point, another necessity emerges: not to continue constructing, but to leave.

The labyrinth fulfills its function not because one remains inside it, but because one passes through it. The exit is not a failure; rather, it is the completion of its logic. Art therefore moves within a field of tension between construction and dissolution, between form and its disappearance. It creates systems in order to make them experiential and drives them toward their limit, to the point at which that limit becomes visible.

Art produces no final truths. It does not strive for closure. It creates situations in which perception, memory and meaning are set in motion, shifting and passing into one another. What emerges from this is not stable knowledge, but a form of experience that cannot be fully translated into language — and becomes shareable precisely because of that.