2026. public performance. Lüneburg.
CONTEXT: “Margit. Old Persian: Pearl. A name travelling across languages and bodies. A body-name carried, displaced and set in motion between worlds. A distant planet: Uranus, beyond she and he. Like a pearl: a changing body, an identity in orbit – tried out, claimed, shed and circled anew over the past two years.”
Orbiting Margit continues Jakob-Margit Wirth’s exploration of bodies, gender norms and institutional identities begun in Cutout. 1km Patriarchy (2023), My Gender Stretch (2023) and Eintrag: Margit (2024).
TEXT: In Orbiting Margit, Jakob-Margit carried, pulled and pushed a pearl from City Hall through a church, shopping centre, marketplace and park. Moving through these everyday and institutional spaces, Jakob-Margit revisited the past two years of negotiating their non-binary identity within bureaucracy, family, friendships, work and public life. As the pearl shifted between Jakob-Margit’s body and its surroundings, each encounter became another moment of carrying, exposing, claiming and negotiating an identity in relation to others.
The performance explored what happens when an inner, often invisible identity is turned outward and lived in public. Becoming Uranus, in dialogue with Paul B. Preciado’s An Apartment on Uranus, unfolded gradually: as Jakob-Margit moved through the city, more cyan appeared on their skin. Jakob-Margit was becoming Uranus without reaching a fixed identity.
Without asking permission, the pearl took up space: cheeky, friendly, strangely magical, like a visitor from another planet. Yet people accepted it in ordinary situations. Jakob-Margit went about daily life, now with their inner identity turned outward and visible. No one said, “There is no place for you here.” The extraordinary entered the everyday.
At the masculine Libeskind façade, before Jakob-Margit painted the last parts of their body, the pearl unexpectedly burst. The spherical companion became a fleshy, skin-like membrane; Jakob-Margit draped it around their body like a coat. Shed skin, new body or protection?
Jakob-Margit’s new identity was tried on, claimed, shed and re-orbited. Margit – “pearl” – moved between appropriation and attribution, visibility and resistance.
Credits
Presented as part of ARTotale Re at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Special thanks to Kostümkollektiv; Kryolan for sponsoring the body paints; Ronja Müller and Arndis for their support; Ciara and Vincent for documentation; Tim for hosting; and Moritz, Marina, Wolfgang, Indra and Rike for conversations that gave Jakob-Margit the confidence to bring this work into public view.
Images, ©Ciara Burges, Videos ©Vincent Jondeau
