Allow me to introduce Marsian De Lellis, a multidisciplinary artist who makes installations, time-based visual narratives, and tactile spectacles. While, across their work, they use narrative-driven objects to unsettle our relationships to embodiment, desire, and identity, it is their work specifically as a puppeteer that most captivates me. Puppetry bridges both theater and visual art by animating objects to tell a story before an audience. In their puppetry work, De Lellis merges a rich sense of texture, scale, and collage with their ability to capture the story-telling capacities of objects. De Lellis is not only a solo performer, but also writes and designs their own shows. Their puppetry is marked by their distinct presence as a performer, the multi-textured worlds they fabricate, and the eccentric personalities they animate.
I was introduced to De Lellis’ work when I saw Object of Her Affection at Links Hall in 2022, as a part of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. Object of Her Affection follows the many love affairs Andrea, an object-sexual, has with inanimate things—a blanket, a gun, the Berlin Wall.
Andrea’s love stories are conventional melodramas. She has a sexual awakening, fantasizes about a bad boy, enters into a love triangle, forms toxic co-dependencies, and ultimately dies in an act of romantic sacrifice. Despite the familiarity of Andrea’s story, something here does not quite fit: not Andrea’s object-sexuality, but the melodramatic love plot that structures Andrea’s romantic attachments to things. De Lellis consistently deflates both the heightened romantic expectations and the tragic ends of the melodramatic plots they set up. As Andrea says, bleeding out on the pavement, “I’ve heard some people say that it’s better to have lost in love. But some of us are just lost… And some of us—are losers.” What results is a profound loneliness in De Lellis’s dramaturgy. They do not make a sentimental plea on Andrea’s behalf to allow her, as a queer subject, to join the ranks of the many in the quest for love. Once melodrama has been deemed an insufficient vehicle for telling Andrea’s story, De Lellis leaves a haunting absence where a genre should be. In doing so, they trouble anaspiration to “representation”—a vague evaluative category so often applied to minoritarian stories.
This past summer, Marsian and I traded several phone calls where we gossiped about the current state of puppet theater [redacted], meandered down several of the rabbit holes Marsian has recently stumbled upon, and griped about making work while holding down a job. Eventually we sat down over Zoom so that we could pursue some of these tangents more thoroughly. In our interview, I asked Marsian about their process in creating their shows, especially their upcoming work, Model Killer, where they tackle another generic conceit—the true crime story—which entails its own kinds of failures to structure our collective fascination with murder.
My description of Object of Her Affection is partially excerpted from a review written for the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival Archives.
MF: Will you introduce yourself? Who are you? What do you work on? Where are you from? Etcetera.
MDL: Hiyeee! I’m Marsian De Lellis. I live in Los Angeles. I’m a visual and performance artist. I work with puppets and dolls. I make performances and installations. I feel like I’m working between both the art and theater worlds, or I’m interested in a space that collapses those models. I make stuff about obsessional lives.
MF: Why do you care about the obsessional? What is it about obsessive people that is interesting to you?
MDL: Maybe I find them interesting because I’m one of them, I mean, like honestly! I made an installation of over 1,200 distressed Raggedy Ann dolls for a fellowship exhibition. The installation was called (In)/Animate Objects and it was an offshoot of a performance of mine, Object of Her Affection, centered on Andrea, a woman, who in her search for love, develops intimate relationships with inanimate objects. Andrea’s primary caregiver, her grandmother, also has her own obsession with things, she’s a collector of Raggedy Anne dolls. In the original iteration of the installation, years have passed since Andrea fell from Roy, a crumbling tenement she was in love with. In sorrow, her grandmother has begun hoarding rag dolls—so many that she can’t manage them. They fill a room and they are decaying and she’s seated in her wingback chair on top of a mountain of them. When I needed an essay for the exhibition catalog, I tapped Allison de Fren, a scholar of fembots, who produced the documentary about artificial companions, called Mechanical Bride. When we were chatting, I asked her, “what’s the throughline in all my work?”and she was the first one to say that it memorializes “obsessional lives.” So I went with that.
MF: The collector’s impulse is also a part of your work. I mean, in Object of her Affection, even though Andrea is not necessarily a collector in the way her grandmother is, she collects love objects, and has this menagerie of buildings, blankets, guns–things she falls in love with that she archives her life through.
MDL: The narrative that reality TV shows like Hoarders portray is simple: a person had some kind of profound loss, and because of the magnitude of their loss, they develop a compulsion to acquire things to fill an emotional void. But then I have a friend who’s a real hoarder and she says it’s a form of perfectionism. What I find interesting about her is that in her public life she makes minimalist sculptures out of lighting instruments, but then in private, her living spaces are so cluttered that it has led to problems with landlords. There’s something strangely delicious about the contradiction in her personal narrative and oddly relatable. My dad, who recently passed away, was an accomplished cancer doctor who smoked throughout his career. Growing up, I watched him in his office obsessively pouring over slides of tumors while the smoke of Carlton 100s filled the air.
MF: Your ability to find these reverberating tensions within small, repeated gestures is so captivating. And it is noticeable in your dramaturgy. How do you use performance, and especially puppetry or object performance, to explore obsessiveness?
MDL: Well, I create solo performances for the most part. I say for the most part, because there are still a lot of collaborators involved, but I’m usually the one on stage, the designer, and the writer. My performances are text heavy and require a lot of memorization time. As part of the process, I repeat lines over and over again and in doing so, I begin to hear more bits of dialogue, and then I hear more characters’ voices in my head. I have an addictive personality and I for sure get a dopamine hit after being able to remember everything.
MF: Well, I mean, this is interesting, too. It’s not about the collecting of things so much, but more the ability to memorize lines that fuels the performance.
MDL: Right? I found that it’s like my best editorial tool—if I can’t remember a line, it’s because something is fucked up. Maybe it’s illogical. Maybe it’s a word I repeated. I try not to repeat words, because sometimes it glitches my memory into loops, but also because each word is an opportunity to get more specific. My director, Michele Spears, thinks that I’m too obsessed with line memorization. She considers herself the “advocate for the story.” When I first heard her proclaim that moniker, I immediately pictured a courtroom scene where the story was on trial and she was the public defender approaching the stand to ask questions to try to protect it… which isn’t that far off because, in the rehearsal process, she’s always doing logic checks and asking questions. “Why is there a flashback in a flashback? That’s bound to be confusing to the audience… Let’s try to simplify or reorder it.” Michele also comes from an improv background and wants me to react in the moment as if I’m the character so that’s part of her story advocacy agenda. But I feel like I need to get the baseline track of the lines internalized so I can do all of that work. I love our push-pull dynamic, and it’s ultimately good for the health of the performance.
My latest performance, Model Killer, is immersive. The production schedule was so compressed that we didn’t quite have the opportunity to figure out in the rehearsal all the intricacies of guiding people through the space while in character. I did eight performances for two days. The performances were an hour each, because I just wanted to test my endurance for an intimate format with only twelve participants at a time. Between day one and day two, I layed in bed all morning to quickly think of more things that the characters could say or do to manage the movement of the audience.
MF: I’m really fascinated by how difference within repetition is a thing that drives you. But first, will you just give a brief description of Model Killer?
MDL: Sure! Model Killer is a noir walk-through puppetry experience that uses fragments of dollhouses as staging areas in a story about a disgruntled dollhouse maker turned investigator who transforms herself into a bloodthirsty serial killer. She makes these models of “unsolved” murders, but in reality, she’s a serial killer responsible for those crimes.
MF: And is this related to the research you’re doing on dollhouses and serial killers and John Darcy Noble?
MDL: Well, it’s partly a homage to Frances Glessner Lee. The inspiration came from seeing an article about The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Lee was this wealthy grandmother in the forties and fifties who wanted to be a police investigator, but her gender was a barrier. Andbecause she was well-off she had the time and resources to learn how to make intricate scale replicas like a miniature working sewing machine, for example. So, she would make these models of unsolved murders and then the Baltimore police department began using them as training devices. They didn’t know the solutions for these unsolved crimes, but they would all look at the model and be like oh, the capsized ashtray had… the ashes were like in a 30-degree projectile. Or like the blood splatter was on that section of the wall or the chair fell over this way, and then they would have to debate: did someone break through the window and then shoot that person? Did this person shoot themselves? There wasn’t a definitive answer. This exercise was just to help them develop their critical thinking skills in putting together clues. Normally, I try to tell as direct a story as possible, where, if you put an object on stage we come back to it, or it has some significance.
MF: Very Chekhovian.
MDL: But then, in this structure (with Model Killer), anything could be a clue, but at the same time, we can’t illustrate everything. But we need to illustrate enough stuff… It’s something I’m figuring out—how to build a world filled with an excess of intrigue and ideas that is somehow ultimately economical.
MF: Do you know how your research on John Darcy Noble will play into this?
MDL: I had this pandemic era residency at Automata. I was supposed to work on Model Killer but for the first three weeks I couldn’t help myself but to clean and organize their space. While I was moving things around in the basement, I found these boxes of books that I opened (because I’m nosey too). And I’m like, what the fuck is this? And there were all these books about dolls. And then it turned out that it was the collection of John Darcy Noble. Noble was a queer bishop, a doll collector, and one of the foremost authorities in the movement to interpret childhood artifacts as significant cultural symbols. He was primarily known for restoring the Stettheimer dollhouse, but he sold kinky paper dolls at leather fairs on the side. By day, he wore a suit at the Museum of the City of New York where he was the Curator of Toys. Outside of work, he had the visual aesthetic of a Radical Faerie. He was part of the Tom of Finland scene. He touched a lot of different parts of the queer community. His book collection was contained in those boxes including binders with ephemera from doll artists that were his contemporaries. They would send him letters, updates, and pictures of the dolls that they were working on. Automata let me hang onto his book collection and I was hoping to put together some resources to make it more of a shareable archive/library.
MF: It sort of speaks to this “obsessional lives” thing where you have to drift through the lives of these people and all these things that they were obsessed with to figure out what is the driving heart of the piece. You have this mass of things, whether it’s models that have these clues or these doll houses. Even if you aren’t thinking of these as being in the same piece, they are all in the same world somehow.
MDL: Part of living in this world is granular research, and then the other part is when…you know how you have dreams that collage together different moments from your day, and bits and pieces of information in a poetic way? So yeah…I’m also living with all the half-made models. And in making them, I got stuck on the wallpaper designs that contain little clues about …well the story starts off with a guided tour as part of the ribbon cutting gala for the Murderabilia Wing of the Institute of Crime. The curator character and the audience are traveling through the Feminist Power Object collection. And so, we get a sampling of all these doll houses with the stories of different female serial killers in them. And then the walk through gets interrupted when there’s a gas attack by the protagonist, Vivian (the disgruntled dollhouse maker) and then it goes into flashbacks that show how she became “The Model Killer.” Part of the story is this tour through the Institute of Crime, but the set designer happens to be Marsian De Lellis (me), who has decided to design each room of that museum as a separate dollhouse. I’m working on the design dramaturgy to make this a bit more clearer.
MF: I want to ask about this narrator role that you play. You play a narrator in Model Killer whose name is Marsian De Lellis. An in Object of her Affection, you play the role of Andrea, narrating her own life. But since Andrea is also played by a doll, you are sort of her double. And the narrator speaks in your voice. There is this slippage that I don’t know if you’re playing with or not, but that I find pretty delightful to watch.
MDL: The thing that I’m working out with Model Killer, too, is that it’s almost like there’s three narrators. There’s Mavis Blumenthal, the lead curator at the Institute of Crime, who happens to be conducting a tour when we enter the performance. But then the container of the performance is a true crime series. So it switches between video interstitials of a true crime show about Vivian that’s highly sensationalized, but then there’s flashbacks that she is narrating. So, there’s me as the narrator of the true crime show, Mavis is the narrator of the tour, and Vivian is the narrator of her own story and flashbacks. So that’s something we’re trying to figure out; it might be too complicated. It’s a lot of things for an audience to track. I started dreaming up Model Killer in 2015. I feel so ashamed that it’s been simmering for almost ten years. I’m not fast enough. I’m not mainstream enough. Every time I have an idea, it…
MF: …I think that actually being asea in culture is kind of cool. You’re swimming through the stuff that everyone else is swimming through but you’re sorting it in a way that no one else is sorting it.
MDL: Well yeah, so Object of Her Affection was inspired by a viral sequence from Married To The Eiffel Tower, where this woman was making love with an amusement park ride named “1001 Nacht.” And that really spoke to me on so many levels. Are you familiar with the word limerence?
MF: No.
MDL: It’s like when you become obsessed with somebody, and they don’t know that they’re the object of the obsession. It’s one-sided where it’s just in your head, and I kind of experience that to varying degrees in my personal life. But then I saw the clip of the woman making out, licking the grease of this amusement park ride, and it just spoke to me, because it’s like, even if it’s a live human being, we’re always projecting some made up fantasy in our head onto them. But then, this woman is projecting it onto these inanimate objects. How is that different? Just because one has a brain and one doesn’t?
MF: This is something that your work does, taking the flawed narrative and showing us how we are telling ourselves the exact wrong story to understand what is happening. But you keep the wrong story. The wrong story is the narrative frame, and you show how the narrative work itself is at odds with what’s happening. Dramaturgically, I’m fascinated by how you can use the wrong story to anchor a piece.
MDL: Yeah, there’s a word for something adjacent to that… “pareidolia.” Pareidolia is the mind’s tendency to assign meaning wherever it can. The world is full of patterns and our brains are always working to find meaning. But sometimes the meanings we ascribe can be wrong like seeing a face in a water faucet, or something bigger like believing the Golden Gate Bridge is cheating on you. I’m also interested in conspiracy theories. I kind of love them. They give easy explanations to something that’s complicated or unexplainable.
But going back to my thoughts about clues… I really don’t like this moment of didactic work that we’re in right now, where you’re almost told what to think or you’re supposed to agree with the values of the artist. Like Frances Glessner Lee, who presents this complicated world to the police detectives, I would like my performances to present “problem-magic” characters and situations where the audience has to decide for themselves their own hot take. I’m trying to set up situations where there isn’t a singular desired reaction. Which I think is a big task.
MF: This is something you did so well in Object of her Affection–playing with these kinds of expectations that a genre sets up for us.
MDL: Since my dad died in February, I’ve become more of a caretaker for my mom, flying back and forth between Los Angeles and Rhode Island. She loves Murder, She Wrote, and I’ve read that Angela Lansbury’s character (Jessica Fletcher) is based on Frances Glessner Lee. I was repulsed by the show for the longest time throughout my childhood and most of my adult life, but now I want to actually sit down with my mom and watch all the episodes with her. It’s like, why is this know-it-all white lady, in a small town, always at the center of murders? And why is she never wrong?
MF: That sounds so interesting to me. Again, it’s keeping these features of the genre quite stable that should be destabilized. This white lady is at the center of all these murders, especially because white women are the paradigmatic victims. This genre is always about protecting the purity of the white woman. But you are putting your finger on this strange cultural relationship between white women and true crime and our obsessions with it. I’m thinking about the podcast, My Favorite Murder. There’s something bizarre about white women simultaneously identifying as both victim and detective.
MDL: There are certain kinds of news shows (Vice News comes to mind) that are in the investigative journalism genre, but kind of edgy— They show all these complex problems in the world. But in sitting back on your sofa passively watching TV, somehow, you are manipulated into feeling like you’re helping find a solution to the problem. But in reality you’re just sitting on a sofa watching a problem progress to its conclusion like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lots of things in life are like self-fulfilling prophecies—you know what’s gonna happen but somehow it’s surprising. Like we’re all gonna die at the end, but then again we don’t know how we’re gonna get there.
Marsian De Lellis is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and activist whose installations and performances memorialize obsessional lives—including their own.
Marissa Fenley is a Harper Schmidt Fellow in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. She is also a dramaturg, sometimes-puppeteer, and avid Real Housewives fan.
Allow Me to Introduce is our recurring feature that makes space for authors to elevate, punctuate, and nuance our reception of the work of artists, writers, and scholars that are worthy of our attention but otherwise underdiscussed. Authors might introduce readers to new works or forthcoming publications, lesser noted themes across an artist’s body of work, or work that emerges form niche and sub-cultural fields that might otherwise escape our attention. This feature can take the form of either an essay about the artist/work or an interview with the artist/writer.
The following interview has been edited for clarity.