SHOW FULL HISTORY


Marike Splint is a Dutch French-Tunisian theatre maker based in Los Angeles, creating work in nontraditional spaces to explore the relationships between people, places and identity.

Artist Bio

SHOW FULL HISTORY is a full-length multimedia documentary performance, combining the liveness of theatre with the seemingly endless archive of the internet. The performance’s title refers to the browser command “show full history” that lists all visited webpages. The concept for this show emerged one evening when Marike was searching the internet for traces of her Tunisian grandfather’s life. She didn’t find anything about him, but found a man of the exact same name. He was the lover and murderer of Habiba Msika, a Tunisian 1920s-era Madonna-like phenomenon who was born near Marike’s mother’s village. More internet clicks revealed the rebellious nature of this performer trained in the Maalouf tradition, who sung openly about having multiple lovers, performed Romeo in drag, and in another performance protested the French colonial rule by wrapping herself in a Tunisian flag and singing pro-independence slogans, leading to her arrest by French authorities. Even more clicks led Marike to recordings of Msika’s singing, then to writings on the history of colonialism, then to online forums about trauma in diasporic families. Eventually she found herself buying a non-leaking water bottle for her toddler after seeing an ad.

Internet browsing histories like these can be seen as diaries, documenting the twists and turns of repetitive online behaviors, impromptu associations, even naive questions. SHOW FULL HISTORY interprets this personal story of digitally-powered discovery through virtual and live mediums to consider how technology shapes perceptions of history, ourselves, and each other.


Award Year
2025
Status

In Progress

This picture is a headshot of theatre artist Marike Splint, who has dark brown hair, brown eyes eyes and olive skin. Her head is somewhat titled and she is looking directly at the camera. She's wearing a black top with mesh detailing.

Marike Splint

Los Angeles, CA

Marike Splint is a Dutch French-Tunisian theatre maker based in Los Angeles, creating work in public space to explore the relationships between people, places and identity. She has created performances in various sites — meadows, taxicabs, train stations, beach piers, subways, a bus driving through city streets, even inside the virtual map of Google Earth. Presenters and commissioners of her original work include La Jolla Playhouse, Center Theater Group, UCLA Center for the Art of Performance, Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State, Skirball Cultural Center LA (USA); Oerol Festival, Theaterfestival Boulevard, Over het IJ Festival (The Netherlands); Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires (Argentina); Urbane Kuenste Ruhr (Germany); GeoAIR (Tbilisi, Georgia); Anciens Abattoirs de Casablanca (Morocco). Among other awards, Marike is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Lincoln City Fellowship, a National Performance Network Creation & Development grant, a Hellman Fellowship and a Columbia University Merit Fellowship. Marike received a BA in philosophy from the University of Amsterdam received her MFA in Directing from Columbia University and serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Theater at UCLA.