In Merklein's work, the complex inner life is brought into a multi-layered narrative by means of alienating body-space relationships. In the black-and-white image-text work "Sitting in the closet," the collapse is described on a textual level as something that is invisible but resembles a ruin on the inside. Through the excavation, symbolically not only a life is rearranged, but also things are assigned and repaired. On a pictorial level, this fragmentation is shown on the one hand by a hand that grasps a door like a spider and on the other hand by an anthropomorphic, reclining body in an abandoned apartment, where one does not know how to correctly locate the bottom and the top.