We live in a time that refuses to pause.
Bodies, economies, and technologies keep accelerating, while exhaustion quietly becomes the defining rhythm of our days. What does “drive” still mean when progress runs in circles?

Daniel Hölzl’s exhibition PROPEL at Galerie Dittrich & Schlechtriem asks that question through the language of materials. His sculptures of wax, carbon fibre, and aircraft fragments explore the contradiction between motion and fatigue, between the desire to move forward and the impossibility of doing so. At their centre stands the propeller — once a symbol of speed and transcendence, now turning in place, measuring the limits of renewal.

Vakuum spoke with him about movement, stillness, and decay — and about what it means to keep creating in a world that can no longer tell progress from repetition.

“I’m interested in material cycles and the tension and interplay between industrial precision and organic decay. I question material origins and transformations — how resources circulate, and how their stories change over time. Many industrial materials we use today are, at their core, natural substances that have gone through cycles of extraction, refinement, and reinvention. Working with them becomes a way of tracing those cycles and rethinking our relationship with innovation and sustainability.”

Innovation, for him, is never neutral. “Progress is deeply ambivalent — both the cause of our ecological problems and the key to many solutions. I’m drawn to those moments when opposites meet, when a seemingly rigid technological structure starts to behave like something alive and ephemeral.” In his studio, those opposites coexist quietly: paraffin wax from church candles beside carbon fibre from decommissioned aircraft. They tell parallel stories of transformation — religious ritual, industrial flight — both reliant on extraction and energy. Together, they become metaphors for a civilisation that confuses motion with meaning.

“For me aviation has always been part of my family’s story. My grandmother’s uncles once built and promptly crashed their own airplane. Both my grandfathers served in the German Air Force during World War II—one volunteered to become a radio operator to avoid the front, the other trained as a pilot and later worked in a secret airplane factory. Though their intentions and experiences strongly differed, both survived because of airplanes. At family gatherings, flying was their only common ground, a subject that carried both pride and unease. I grew up sensing that tension, between fascination and fear, survival, and destruction. Airplanes and propellers have come to embody that for me — symbols of both survival and destruction, of human fascination and failure.”

That paradox — technology as both saviour and threat — runs through PROPEL. Hölzl’s propellers are not engines of progress but of introspection. They mark the exhaustion that follows acceleration. Berlin, where he lives and works, amplifies that duality. “Berlin gives you space — both physically and mentally. You can work directly with architecture, leftover industrial spaces, or traces of history. The city is full of contrasts.” His practice echoes that rhythm: cyclical, reflective, and self-referential. “Environmental awareness is embedded in the process itself. I reuse materials from earlier installations, which feels natural because my practice is about cycles anyway. Art can make complex questions tangible without having to explain them literally. Sometimes the topic is heavy, but sometimes it’s even treated with humour.”

“I work with recycled paraffin wax and recycled carbon fibre, both petroleum-based yet completely different in behaviour. Wax is soft and transient, carbon fibre rigid and lasting. I am drawn to that contrast. Wax embodies impermanence and transformation; it stores and releases energy, shifting between solid and liquid, and it reacts to its surroundings. In my work it becomes a co-author, recording change over time and reminding us that all materials are only ever borrowed.”

In a culture obsessed with efficiency and acceleration, Hölzl’s work offers pause. It neither moralises nor romanticises; instead, it reflects a civilisation that has mistaken rotation for progress. His propellers turn, but they no longer promise flight. “Art can pull us out of familiarity. In a time of rapid change, and with history always trying to repeat itself, we need as much culture as possible to help us see, think, and imagine differently.”In that idea lies the quiet strength of PROPEL. Hölzl doesn’t claim to slow the world down, nor to fix what is broken. Instead, his work performs a kind of awareness — it lets us witness what happens when energy becomes fatigue, when progress folds back on itself, when the desire to move forward turns into a loop. To stand in front of one of his propellers is to feel both tension and calm, the echo of an engine that no longer wants to leave the ground. Perhaps this is what progress looks like now: not flight, but reflection. Not momentum, but a deeper form of endurance. Maybe that is what truly drives us — not acceleration, but attention. The fragile ability to notice the systems we inhabit, to pause within them, and to imagine something different.

PROPEL is on view at Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin, until October 25, 2025.