The fictional character as “border artist”

"I have to kill her," Tom Neuwirth once said when asked in an interview about his fictional character Conchita Wurst. But can fictional characters die at all? The character Maria Marshal has already experienced and survived her death. Now she wants to tell about her life after death as vividly as never before. And about being in between: Between life and death, between art and science, between different worlds. For Maria Marshal sees herself as a "border artist" who crosses borders. For author Gloria Anzaldúa, the term "border artist" goes beyond geographical boundaries and also refers to "risk takers: artists who straddle multiple (often oppressive, colonized, neo-colonized) worlds and use their negotiations to decolonize the various spaces in which they exist." (Keating 2015: 18) In Maria Marshal's lecture at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, the expert on fictional characters will autoethnographically explore questions about them:

How does it feel for an fictional character to be killed by its artist?
Can characters lead a life of their own, separate from their artists?
How free is art when it is indistinguishable from everyday life?
How do characters in art heal colonial wounds?
And why did Maria Marshal decide against becoming famous?

To answer these questions, Maria Marshal refers to her research, in which she moves between science, art, life and magic. And for the first time she will present to an audience her still unreleased hit "MEGA" including a music video.

About Maria Marshal:

Together with her civilian Mira Kandathil, Maria Marshal's collaborative research explores themes of identity, agency, authorship, being a star, artistic forms of knowledge generation, and the interference between art and science. Kandathil and Marshal are developing a new performative-ethnographic method, which they call "Performing Observation." Their dissertation at SINTA (University of Bern/University of the Arts Bern) on art figures is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and is part of the interdisciplinary research project "Fictional characters - Design Processes of Fictive Identities", realized at the Institute Practices and Theories of the Arts at the University of the Arts Bern.

https://www.hkb-interpretation.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/documents/Veranstaltungen/IPTK_Kunstfiguren_A4_def.pdf

Maria Marshal is an accomplice of the duo Follow Us. Follow Us consists of the artists Annina Machaz and Mira Kandathil. The duo realizes theater projects and performances about women* who shape them: such as historical figures from antiquity and pop culture, protagonists from literature and mythology, and people from their environment. Their work has been shown at Sophiensælen Berlin, Gessnerallee Zurich and ImPulsTanz Vienna.

https://www.mirannina.com

The lecture will take place in the lecture hall of the Museum for Contemporary Art Siegen and will be held in German. Free entry.

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