The one that pushes me most is definitely performance, especially when I perform myself and gotta give up control. I'd be miserable for weeks before the show and get on everybody's nerves. It's MUCH easier for me to post studio views and snapshots on social media or to write short satirical texts. I always have a lot to complain about, so it comes easily to me to joke about social codes and unconscious biases, about the ambivalence between political beliefs and how people actually live their lives, or simply to address the (countless) struggles in the studio. I still see that part of my practice as a side project, but it affects my overall body of work and brings me ease.

First, I construct a skeleton that is as realistic as possible out of a sturdier material, then I cover the whole thing with fabric that resembles muscle, tendons, or flesh and skin. This is essential so that I can later position the figures in postures and poses that the body remembers and associates with certain emotional states, which can help convey their inner lives. The mouth and eyes play an important role, too. If that works out, they seem to have thoughts, feelings, a story, and a past. They tend to stare at you accusingly, especially during the worst moments.

I love playing with these cross-references. I believe I have never created a work that was not multilayered; I’m obsessed with questions and ambivalences instead of clear messages.

In film, and even more in theatre, roles and actors blend together, yet at the same time, the role is obviously merely played. But how can this be the case without destroying the illusion? This is incredibly interesting.

In my work, when I depict a historical figure like the 19th-century diplomat, archaeologist, and geographer Gertrude Bell, she already embodies multiple roles, including the “real” persona of actress Nicole Kidman, who portrays Gertrude in Werner Herzog’s film Queen of the Desert (2015). Furthermore, she carries with her images from the collective consciousness: of Kidman herself on the one hand, and of Kidman’s past film roles on the other.

And it’s even more confusing than that: because even those who create new characters, in this case director Werner Herzog, often draw on specific historical narratives and social conventions themselves, the character also brings these often quite stereotypical images to life for us. She performs them, so to speak. And btw., this performance is also performed.

All this apocalyptic shit, fascism, imperialism, Trumpism, all of this is part of human history, and it is being (re)written every day. And it matters who writes these narratives, which people, not just kids at school, often take for granted.

Life in 2026 is bittersweet to me, sour sometimes, incredibly brutal, destructive, raw, boring, ridiculous; you just want the year to end soon, without any bigger damage.

I could speak about living in my safe, healthy, rich, privileged bubble called Switzerland at this point, but I don’t feel like it.

Instagram has always been easy to consume, competitive, and showy, just like large parts of the art market. In 2018, I realized this was a perfect fit and began creating self-reflections through a fictional artist persona.

After a few years, I’d already grown a bit bored with it, but since Black Lives Matter and later the pandemic, it’s become much more exciting. Coverage of topics that are underrepresented or censored in other media, as well as alliances among activist groups, fake news, and the reinforcement of one’s own views within one’s own bubble, are all part of this absurd mix. I see Instagram almost as both a reflection and a catalyst of social issues.

I mean, it’s about all the small things. Like, for example, when you present a work that satirically criticizes one-dimensional thinking, and then the curator follows one particular conservative line and you have endless discussions about it.

I was recently invited to an exhibition, a “non-budget” exhibition in some project space, and it was a young team, so I figured: All right, I’ll go for it. For support. My contribution to the exhibition, which was about identity and the body, was a video animation (shipped for free) of one of my characters, who was portrayed as both male and female at different points, once with a beard, e.g. Shortly after, the same character is pregnant. And then giving birth. To a little gray elephant.

The curator sent me a long voice message. She was extremely dissatisfied with my choice of work. She didn’t want to give a male protagonist, who I believe was the only person/puppet perceived as Black in the exhibition, that much space. She didn’t understand that it was one and the same character and that I wanted to make the construction of gender visible through it. So, when someone comes across as particularly moralistic, it should REALLY make everyone suspicious.

Another example: you have a show somewhere, have no social life for months on end, and see nothing but the walls of the studio, where you have to climb over several artworks multiple times a day just to get to the bathroom because it’s so tiny. And you have to go there constantly because you have to stick your head under the cold stream of water in the sink, since, of course, you don’t have air conditioning. And later on, you get a ridiculous amount as a fee. Then you accidentally find out that the technician, who produced one out of several pieces in the show within two weeks, earned twice that amount. Just ridiculous.

I'm an open book. Really.

Those gaps led me to explore my topics through a few detours. And those detours turned out to be extremely interesting. Suddenly, film history, anti-racist and Black movements in West Germany, pop culture, and ’90s TV shows became important.

We always look back at the past from the perspective of today. And then, looking back, we scratch our heads and either ask ourselves, “Why on earth haven’t we learned anything from that?” or think, “Wow, back then on Beverly Hills, 90210, nobody ever questioned the body mass index of the actresses; everybody had to be thin and pale, without any doubt.”

May Ayim's research into Afro-German history was a reference for Original Features because of how she worked, more than because of what she found. She combined historical writing with poetry, activism, and autobiography without strictly separating them into different registers. Her poems have a very specific tone, kind of straight, honest, unmistakably German. Ayim also grew up in Münster, close to where I used to live, so even the local grain of her voice feels familiar.

I cry every time I read her, and I feel love at the same time, not only because her poems are sad (they are), but also simply because she describes a world that I know very well. Growing up in a mostly white environment, seeing myself reflected through someone else's story feels like coming home.

What that gave me for Original Features was permission to trust personal recognition as a way into history, and to let poetry, everyday speech, and historical material sit inside the same figure without deciding in advance which one is doing the real work.

I know that my body doesn't really belong to me. As a racialised person who is perceived as female, I have always felt this way, but it took on a new dimension while I was pregnant and under the care of predominantly white male doctors. I lost the beauty privilege, gained weight, and hated my huge boobs.

The way we perceive ourselves and others is regulated by power structures, and in my work, my goal is to destabilise these structures, create uncertainty, and exaggerate these systems to show how absurd they are.

Most importantly, becoming and being a parent has politicised me in a new way. As an artist, you do your own thing, at least theoretically, but as a parent, you have to deal with the education system, hospitals, and people with completely different lifestyles. I'm constantly pushed out of my comfort zone and away from the art world, which is annoying but also healthy, I suppose.

We came together from very different backgrounds. During the rehearsal process, we shared our experiences of being South African, Afro-Brazilian, and Afro-German. During the performance, our bodies became one and became objects, and in a way, our trauma and biases did too. All the messiness and sadness of the work became part of us.

At the same time, the collaboration taught us a great deal about our differences, and not just in terms of belonging or representing Black women, whatever that really means in different parts of the world.

Grzimek's Serengeti Shall Not Die (1959) was one of the great mid-century performances of ecological guardianship, but it was also a colonial fantasy. He filmed a landscape whose supposed purity depended on the displacement of the people who lived there. Wakanda Forever (2022) is the mirror image from the other side of the century, an Afrofuturist projection that returns to the same geography with a completely reversed vision.

What interested me in putting the two into conversation is that both are constructions of Africa produced elsewhere, and both keep circulating as decoration in European daily life. The zebra-striped airplane Grzimek used for his aerial surveys is now reproduced as a promotional object at the Zurich Zoo, selling family tickets. Wakanda costumes reappear in high-street chains. In the installation, the two images collide, and the Maasai, who are still fighting for their land today, walk between them.

None of the three quite fits. Correction implies I know how the record should read. Complication implies I want to make it harder to read. What I want is to open a different door in the same room. When I revisit Zürich Dada's use of African forms through the later idea of Black Dada, my aim is to keep that material in circulation and let the sequel be written from another position.

Unknowing, Unearthing was made with New Kyd and Tiran Willemse and shown at a gallery in Zürich as well as at Helmhaus Zürich in 2024. Together, we did not lecture the Dada archive from outside. We inhabited it, sewed onto it, and asked it to answer to voices it never originally included. It is a work that acknowledges its own inheritance while refusing to be frozen inside it.

As a child, you know that some corridors are dark and that neighbours avoid each other. You do not yet understand how much of this was shaped by the way the place was designed and managed. Hannibal II was built in 1976 as the architectural realisation of West Germany's promise to all its citizens: affordable housing and social mix. Anonymity, hostility, staff shortages, few meeting places, tenant turnover, all of that followed almost immediately, and the same promise was being broken in dozens of other complexes across the country in the same way.

In 2017, Hannibal II was evacuated within a few hours because of construction defects. 753 people became homeless, and the renovation delays turned the building into a textbook case of citizens' powerlessness against internationally operating investors. As a child, I lived inside this arrangement without recognising it as one. What I understand now is that the private textures of that childhood, the smells, the fights, the loneliness, were produced by a political and economic structure that had a name.

The two names are related only by chance. A concrete complex in postwar West Germany bears the name of a North African commander who crossed the Alps with an army in the third century BC.

My father came from Morocco to Dortmund as a migrant worker at the Hoesch steelworks, and I grew up under that name without ever thinking about it. Following the coincidence meant taking it seriously as a sign that this kind of trans-Mediterranean movement also runs through my own biography.

In 2017, the estate was evacuated within a few hours because of construction defects in the ventilation system. Seven hundred fifty-three people lost their homes overnight and could not take much with them. The general in the name did not save them. But his name still points across the Mediterranean, and that is the direction the work has kept moving in.

Atlas Studios in Ouarzazate is an open-air film complex in Morocco where empire has been reshot for decades. Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Game of Thrones: an unending stream of biblical and historical fantasies produced for foreign audiences. Moroccan workers walk on and off the sets as extras in imagined versions of their own past, and the place doubles as a living archive of how the West has manufactured its idea of North Africa and the Middle East.

What fascinated me was exactly that doubling. The machinery does not hide the fact that it is machinery. Everyone on set knows the palace is plaster. But the images that leave the studio circulate elsewhere as authenticity.

Showing the work at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome, the historical capital of one of those empires, tightened the loop even further. The puppets moved through a setting in which they were already expected to play certain characters. What interested me was the moment at which the figures refuse the roles that had been written for them and start writing something else with the same materials.