People actually ask me quite often where my ideas come from. Which creative techniques I use. Whether I work with sketches, mood boards, philosophical concepts or carefully structured methods to develop a new series.
The honest answer is considerably less spectacular than most people probably expect.
Creativity, at least in my case, rarely functions in a linear or controllable way. Most series do not begin with a single clear thought, but with a slow accumulation of fragments. Impressions, observations and associations settle somewhere in the background over days or weeks, apparently without any connection to one another. Then suddenly, a very small trigger is enough for those fragments to begin linking themselves together.
The series Habitus is a good example of this process.
During a stay in Umbria, a song kept playing on the radio: Che fastidio by Ditonellapiaga. At first, I barely paid attention to it. It simply existed in the background, like so many things one hears while driving, walking through Italian towns or sitting in cafés. A refrain. A certain irritation in the tone. Nothing more.
Weeks later, back in Vienna, I was sitting in front of the television watching Affari Tuoi on RAI. My wife and I occasionally enjoy watching Italian television programmes. Partly because it helps us keep our Italian alive and improve it a little further, but also because Italian entertainment shows possess an atmosphere completely different from their German-speaking counterparts. They are louder, more emotional, more chaotic, often wonderfully excessive and at the same time strangely human. One does not watch them in search of intellectual depth, but rather to unwind, to let the mind slow down for a while and simply step outside everyday routines.
That was precisely the reason the television was on that evening.
Then Ditonellapiaga appeared live on stage.
And suddenly something started working.
Not slowly. Not consciously. More like a chain reaction that had already been prepared somewhere beneath the surface. The song suddenly gained shape. Its irritation. Its irony. This world of rehearsed gestures, standardised appearances and social performance elevated into routine. People moving inside an invisible system of rules that nobody openly formulates and yet everyone obeys.
From there, the thoughts continued outward. Toward social environments. Toward circles in which one must master certain codes simply to be acknowledged. Toward parallel social worlds in which belonging is never demanded openly, but silently expected. Not through force. Through habitus.
And eventually Hobbes entered the process almost inevitably. His famous idea of the bellum omnium contra omnes — the “war of all against all” — ultimately describes a condition in which every shared structure collapses. Without rules, conventions, manners and tacit agreements, human coexistence would not become freedom, but permanent conflict. Society therefore requires forms. It requires rituals, boundaries and social codes within which people can exist together at all.
For that reason, the series is not intended as a simplistic rejection of social norms. Quite the opposite. Many of these structures support us. They create protection, predictability and mutual consideration. Without them, community itself would hardly be possible.
And yet precisely there lies the danger.
Every form of order contains a tendency toward self-perpetuation. Orientation slowly becomes control. Behaviour becomes performance. Social cohesion turns into a system of silent adaptation in which visibility, acceptance and even personal value increasingly depend on how precisely one fulfils certain expectations. At some point, it is no longer the human being shaping society — society begins shaping the human being.
That gradual shift became the real subject of Habitus. Not open oppression, but the far subtler processes through which social mechanisms become internalised so deeply that they eventually appear entirely natural.
Alongside this, other cultural fragments unexpectedly resurfaced. Certain Austrian songs, for example, dealing with social conformity, belonging and the quiet pressures hidden within everyday life. Italian pop culture, political philosophy and personal observation slowly began circling around the same underlying tension.
From that point onward, the visual concept almost developed by itself.
The band became the central symbol of the series. At first it appears protective, supportive, almost reassuring. Gradually, however, its function changes. It begins shaping the body, tensioning it, controlling visibility and expression, until finally, in the last image, a force emerges from outside the frame itself — a social pull that no longer even needs to be shown directly because it has already been fully internalised.
What interests me in retrospect is less the finished result than the path leading toward it. Creativity rarely consists of actively inventing something from nothing. More often, the individual elements already exist somewhere in the background long before one recognises their relationship to one another. A song. A sentence. A television programme. A philosophical idea. A fleeting social observation. For weeks nothing appears to happen. Then suddenly a small impulse is enough for those fragments to connect almost on their own.
The real creative process therefore often lies not in forcing ideas into existence, but in remaining attentive enough to notice these moments when they occur.
Inspiration rarely arrives ceremoniously.
Sometimes it simply sits hidden somewhere between light entertainment television, Italian pop music and the sudden realisation that social order does not merely exist outside the human being — but slowly inscribes itself into posture, body and visibility itself.