Thomas Lempertz researches in his performance „Collective Skin“ his own body perception after extreme self-optimization and the striving for external ideal. The physical union with an extreme extended gender is like a ritual in which enslavement is addressed by the deformation of one's own body. The relationship between body and space must be rediscovered and explored with regard to proximity and demarcation. In doing so, the skin represents its own physical limitation and at the same time the beginning of sensory perception. The performance reveals the narrow degree of self-optimization, in which efforts to perfect the body can quickly turn into the opposite and become tyranny. In the accompanying sound of Heidi Grandy, the gallery space becomes the resonance space of human heartbeats, which are composed into different rhythms.