Biography

Diellza Ilgner is a German Malta-based transdisciplinary performance artist working across theatre, multimedia, and audience-engaged art. Her work explores social themes such as migration, disability and environmental urgency. As co-founder of ConsciousArtDuo and Maghna, Diellza merges art therapy approaches with activism, developing inclusive methodologies that welcome community voices and aim to highlight existing solutions towards sustainable action. Her performances frequently involve collaboration with underrepresented groups and site-specific contexts, using storytelling, movement, and language. She has written, directed, and performed numerous original works, including BLACKOUT, examining media addiction and data surveillance; @dd_icted, addressing AI and social isolation; Hurray Our World is Ending!, exploring paralysis in an overwhelmed world and HOMESICK exploring cleithrophobia in an overdeveloped island that is losing green spaces to developers.

Ilgner holds a BA (Hons) in Performing Arts (First Class) from MCAST Institute for the Creative Arts. She has presented work at Addis Ababa, We can! Festival (Ethiopia), Spazju Kreattiv (Malta), Neues Schauspiel Leipzig (Germany), and Refugee Week Malta. She serves on the CRPD and AISO Academy advisory board and was selected as an emerging artist by Arts Council Malta in the Artivisti programme. 

Artistic project

Identità is an immersive performance in public space, set in front of an official building. The audience starts seated on foldable chairs arranged on both sides of a queue. A small group of performers are already waiting in line.

The performance begins with a short scene in the queue. That scene is about the experience of leaving one place and arriving in another, and everything that happens in between. It sits inside the bureaucratic machinery of migration policy, the waiting, the paperwork and finds within it a meeting point of languages, stories and each other. The performance celebrates things people carry with them when they move: a greeting, a ritual, a sound. It asks, collectively, where we belong in the world. The opening scene is not fixed. It is devised in each city with people who have direct experience of migration and displacement living there.

Then the audience gets pulled in. Numbers are handed out. When your number is called you join the queue. Once you're in it, things start happening: an officer hands you a form in a language you don't understand and expects you to fill it in. The line splits into different queues depending on how you answer certain questions. 

Performers embedded in the line ask you questions about your cultural background while you wait. These happen the way conversations in queues sometimes do.

At the same time, officers move through the people still sitting down and tell them they're not allowed to sit. Chairs get folded and stacked to the side. This happens gradually throughout the piece, so that by the end there are no chairs left and the entire audience is on their feet, in the queue or near it, waiting. At the end of the performance, each person receives a passport, a small handmade zine created by community members during workshops held before the performance. 

This piece grows out of ongoing research into Forum Theatre and participatory performance as tools for social engagement, and specifically from work around migration and bureaucracy developed in Malta. The starting point was a simple observation: that the waiting room and the queue are experiences that almost everyone who has navigated a migration system knows intimately.

The piece is designed to work in public space, outside actual official buildings, immigration offices, government buildings or embassies. It needs almost nothing technically and can be performed in any city. The cast includes a migration officer, two security guards, and a small number of curious people that want to join the workshops leading up to the performance.

Format: performance

Size of audience: 10-100 people 

Specific location: in a city, crowded places

Timing/duration: 45 to 60 minutes approximately