In my Space / In your Space

A short essay on skin, distance, and the quiet power of exposure. How a bag becomes a medium, and how nudity and intimacy is carried out of context.

Ongoing Research
Research started in 2009 / Edited April 2025

 

We live in times of hyper-visibility—and yet, so many of us remain unseen. We experience a kind of non-existence. Anonymity can be terrifying. It can also be liberating. This text is a study in both.

In a world of vast anonymity, fears and openness begin to merge. Anonymity enables a new sense of freedom—an overcoming of the existing system. Everything becomes possible without being recognized. It gives us a new kind of power, one that is fearless of the societal rules that shape us.

To watch or to take part. Voyeurism as a form of transcendence—and a form of freedom. Being naked no longer means shame. More than that, one finds a group of like-minded individuals. Intimacy is openly displayed. The distance built between microcosms begins to fade.

And what about social media? Perhaps the highest stage of anonymity and voyeurism ever created. A place where bodies are constantly revealed, curated, consumed—without context, without depth. We scroll through strangers’ lives, project ourselves, judge, desire, replicate. We hide behind usernames and filters while demanding rawness from others. It is a strange intimacy: detached, hollow, addictive. A theatre of surface. One where the boundaries between self and image, between observer and observed, collapse completely.

The digital cosmos is breaking down. Digital anonymity is changing the way we receive and perceive the world. We no longer experience reality through physical presence. The distance between bodies collapses. But what is intimacy, really?

It is not that nostalgic, private Biedermeier space we imagine. Intimacy is a culturally constructed stage—constantly challenged, controlled, and voyeurized. Who decides what intimacy is? The body? Nudity? Only because society and its cultural systems define it that way.

Intimacy. Nudity. Anonymity. Voyeurism. Bodies. Freedom.

But what about shame? What about the naked body?

If we break it down—the body is our natural microcosm. The shell of the mental character. The outermost protective layer is the skin. To be naked, to show skin, is to show everything. To expose flaws without filter. The skin is the final layer before the inside. Three layers before reaching the actual human being.

The skin consists of three layers: the subcutaneous tissue—the fat cushion, the reserve; the dermis—an elastic layer, loose connective tissue; and the epidermis—made of five layers, all living cells, shedding every 27 days.

There is no complete image of the body. Only fragments. Shells. Reflections. “Three layers before the actual self,” I wrote once. Kruger shows us that this “self” may never be visible—because it is always already overlaid.

This essay was written in dialogue with images that came before—most notably Barbara Kruger’s iconic 1989 work Your Body is a Battleground. While Kruger confronts, I observe. Where she splits, I peel. We both ask: how many layers until we reach the self?

So perhaps we can’t overcome the shame of our naked bodies. But what if we change the perspective? The canvas? The setting?

Oliviero Toscani’s unreleased Spring/Summer 1993 campaign for United Colors of Benetton comes to mind:

“With the campaign showing genitals of all ages and all skin colors, neatly cropped like passport photos, lined up individually in rectangles, clinically arranged like in a type case. All those who posed for it did so anonymously, behind a screen. To this day, I cannot assign a single genital to a face. Not even my own. When I photographed the genitals, plain and simple, like a collection of accessories, I never lowered myself to the vulgar level of certain sexist advertising or many offensive TV stations. My limit is vulgarity.”
(Toscani, Oliviero: “Advertising is a Smiling Corpse”, Paris 1995)

The Abstract Intimacy Bag

That’s where this project began: with observation. Life drawing. Material tests. Skin samples. Installation drafts. Collage sketches. Photos. Slides. A study in layers. A study in presence. A study in absence.

The Abstract Intimacy Bag is a contradiction in itself. A shopping tote bag—or as we call it in Germany, a Jutebeutel—is a symbol of a certain social group. A useful product becomes a canvas. And on it: genitals. Unnamed. Unidentifiable. Placed in a context where they don’t belong.

At first glance, you don’t even recognize what it is. The print seems shameful, scandalous—but only because we’re not used to seeing it like this. A genital on a cotton poplin bag. Cotton poplin—the classic material for white dress shirts, the symbol of assimilation, of performing within the system. And then, a print that is too raw, too unexpected. Genitals that don’t separate into male or female—because in the end, maybe it makes no difference.

We react to what we have been socialized to see. We are shocked in a social sense. But we don’t actually see it for what it is. A body. Female and male. No big difference. Both naked. On a cotton bag. That’s all it is. No more. No less.

A body is never just a body.
It’s a question. A space. A quiet rebellion.

Further reading:
Barbara Kruger – Your Body is a Battleground (1989)
Judith Butler – Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)
Georges Didi-Huberman – Ähnlichkeit und Berührung (1997)