In 2011, students of Städelschule invited writer Mark von Schlegell to organise a fiction seminar in the school. Since then, the class, Pure Fiction, has brought together current and former Städel students to examine and above all produce texts in the most diverse forms possible, from written artistic works and experimental writing to readings, plays, and performances that inevitably draw in other aspects of the diverse artistic practices of all the seminar members.

In Sofia, Pure Fiction takes title and starting point from the medieval form of the morality play, a short dramatic work intended to convey moral principles. Such plays were performed by travelling professionals for the general medieval audience, a tough crowd, no doubt. They already subverted their naming, mixing vulgar humour and farce with a moral inquiry that always included the amoral, seen as much in the works of Rabelais as in the paintings of Heironymous Bosch.

Pure Fiction initiates a week of writing with the idea of morality hovering above us, like a stern but absent authority figure. Is morality always present in fiction? Isn’t it?

Please join us on Friday, 13 October ат 18 h when the class will stage a dramatised reading of the results.