REGGIE VOIGTLÄNDER

All Moves Within the Same Current

This artistic practice begins from the belief that all things are interconnected - without fixed beginnings or endings. Installations emerge as spaces for reflection and dialogue, where presence and absence are explored through bodies, objects, and memories. These elements carry political resonance within broader socio-historical frameworks.

Everyday objects are central, not only for their familiarity but for their feminist implications. Domestic items evoke the household as a historically gendered space - a site of expectation shaped by patriarchal structures. Yet these same objects also speak to care, coexistence, and the rhythms of shared life.

Furniture and other recurring materials become vessels of memory and meaning. While rooted in personal experience, the work gains universal relevance by engaging historical realities and collective narratives. It interrogates how history is constructed, erased, and reimagined - and how these processes shape identity and memory.

Absence becomes a generative force: what is not seen, but felt, opens space for reflection. The missing - a body, a story, a trace - invites contemplation and creates room for meaning to emerge. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, the installations invite interpretation. They are often interactive, site- or event-specific, and designed to foster direct engagement. In these spaces, memory shifts, stories evolve, and the invisible becomes palpable. Contemplation becomes transformation.

A distinctive aspect of this practice is the integration of mental coaching with artistic expression. This intersection creates a space where reflection meets empowerment, where art becomes both a site of introspection and a catalyst for change. Through an activist lens, the work seeks personal and societal transformation.

The role of the artist here is not to tell stories, but to create conditions for dialogue. Questions are posed about what is remembered, forgotten, rewritten, or passed on. Visitors are invited to locate themselves within these dynamics. Presence becomes an active gesture, a political act of awareness, connection, and change.

Art as Resistance

As an artist, I engage with urgent and meaningful issues, aiming to inspire positive change in the world. Nature plays a vital role in this process. My art practice is a form of resistance, a creative commitment to raising awareness about universal aspects of human existence, and the ways in which they can be understood or misunderstood. This exploration is both personal and relational, unfolding in dialogue with others.

Relational

I believe in diversity and xenogamy. The media I work with are closely tied to the interactions I seek with my surroundings and the activities I engage in. Everything we know is interconnected, though not always perceived that way. On one hand, I prefer to maintain a certain distance between individual works, allowing each to exist within its own constellation. On the other hand, I aim to highlight relationships. As a result, my work often evolves into situations of multiplicity, sometimes taking the form of (total) installations or immersive environments.

Truth in the shadows

My work grows from a deep sense of connection with the natural world, not as something outside of us, but as something we, as humans, are part of. This awareness shapes how I create. It arises from a recognition that the natural world, as we experience it through earthly existence, is part of a larger whole, one that is also connected to the non-physical, or spiritual. This world, in both its tangible and intangible dimensions, gives direction to everything that takes shape and manifests in meaningful relationships. Not merely as a physical environment, but as a sustaining reality in which the unseen is also held.

In the natural environment, we find ourselves in relation to the earth: with our feet in the soft sand, on the hard stones, the sharp rocks. Touching and being touched. By the wind, the sun, the rain. The green, the yellow, the red. Amid all colours, scents and tastes: life and death. “Natural shade is the best shade,” my mother once said, sitting beneath the butterfly bushes in my garden. And she was right.

When does nature become land? For me, land emerges through politics, not as a gradual transition, but as an act of intervention. In my work, nature returns through references to landscape, or through the use of natural elements in relation to everyday life. I do not depict nature literally, but it resonates throughout the work, through landscape references, fragments of it, and objects that relate to daily life. In this way, the connection becomes visible. My work is not merely a reflection on nature, but a way to make that sense of belonging tangible, in form, material, and meaning.

I work from a deep sensitivity to the natural world as source, as carrier, as space of connection, both physical and more-than-physical. My work is a way to let that experience speak and perhaps, to invite others to meet it in their own way.

Fields of Connection

I permit myself a wide versatility. I move between mediums, not to master them, but to open space. To expand. To create opportunity, understanding, transformation.

From this approach, my work often takes shape as total installations. They consist of sub-installations; fragments that can stand alone, but also speak to each other. Their relationship is often expressed through a landscape-oriented language. Not literal landscapes, but the sense of terrain, of orientation, of space and place, welcoming external forces into the process. Gravity. Light. Not as tools, but as collaborators. They are part of the work: Visible, present, shaping what emerges. Each element carries its own weight. Together, they form a field of connection, a living terrain shaped by their own presence.

Being born in Germany to a Dutch mother meant repeated car journeys: First to visit my Dutch family in the Netherlands, and later, after moving there, back to Germany to visit my father and homeland. From an early age, I watched the landscape shift: mountains to flatland, large city to small town, and back again. That movement shaped my understanding of space and place, with all their specifics, and the connected whole. It deeply influenced how I began to understand the world, and still does.

Traveling, or simply moving through the world, is essential to me. It’s during these journeys, whether long or brief, even walks around the neighborhood or hikes through the forest, that I feel most connected to the world, and to the universe itself. Even holding a small leaf in my hand, tracing its veins with my eyes and fingers, experiencing its richness through color and texture, that too is a journey, and a way of connecting.

This way of experiencing is reflected in how I connect with others, and perhaps why my work evolved toward public interventions, interactive installation art, and more recently, a cross-over practice that integrates mental coaching. Movement, attention, relation - they move within the same current.