Virgen María at Pohoda 2019
Pohoda 2019 will also have the avant-garde artist Maria Forqué who performs as DJ-Virgen María. With her new music project, she leaves behind the previous experimental performance project “Beta_0 <3” and focuses on finding the future of EDM. Her work indicates how she imagines this future: combining Latin rhythms, techno, experimental production, and dance structures into a meditative trance. During her Asian tour, she started working on an EP that she is currently recording in London; she will introduce it at Pohoda before it is released.
05. June 2019
María represents a generation that was born into a technological age where the virtual world is a physical extension of a person themselves. In her work, she focuses on meditation, sexuality, life and death, virtual reality, spirituality, and vulnerability, and her expression includes work with nudity. In cooperation with Filip Custic, she created an exhibition at the James Fuentes Gallery, entitled “patafisica: fragmentacion, suspensión”, where she used her own naked body (tied and hung) as a live installation. Her artistic work does not, however, always receive understanding. For example, her Instagram account was blocked because of her work with nudity. María criticizes the hypocrisy of this approach, pointing out that Instagram itself is full of porn, self-harm, animal killing, and propagation of bulimia and anorexia. As she stated in Vice, her visual expression is a middle finger to the world, which at one point condemns a naked body for monetizing it moments later.
“To me, Virgen María has perfected the concept of the deity of an artist, which is something that the original DJ scene kept rejecting as an embarrassing part of the rock scene—just to have DJʼs become “gods” of huge gaudy stages a few decades later, where the rockersʼ demands of glam rider seem like a motto of modesty. Mixing while sitting, kneeling, or resting in the hot tub and working on a phone or tablet, with the expression of a bored silicone beauty, she ironizes the hard work on the stage. She has brought the role of female artists as sex idols into the absurd. The sets of Virgen María are a complex concept that ironizes the contemporary music scene starting from artistic name, through work with music to the visual form of live “concerts”, says Michal Kaščák about choosing Virgen María.