In I, Hereby, Michelle Samba lets rhythm, ritual, and material merge in an intense performance. For six days, in a self-created setting of table, chair, stacks of paper, and hand-carved stamps, she takes to stamping sheets of paper… with her own blood.
Joseph Beuys was an extraordinarily versatile artist who ultimately left a mark on contemporary art movements. He is known, for instance, for his famous statement: “Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler” (“Everyone is an artist”).
Together with twelve other artists, Michelle dove into archival material about Beuys’ life and work. The artists listened to fragments from researchers, former students, and past collaborators. They shared food, field notes, strolls, and ideas. What emerged was not one Beuys, but thirteen different Beuys-es. The results were in a summer exhibition at Schloss Moyland, in the village of Bedburg-Hau (just across the border from Nijmegen).
Like Beuys, Samba uses her own materials: her own body, her own blood, and discarded office paper to create a new toolkit alongside rhythm, voice, text, image, and sound.
I, Hereby grows out of different lines of her work: her earlier performance series Hit Me Baby, re-performances of Marina Abramović, her interactive installation Gateways at Oerol, and her research into etchings and linocuts. Her work searches for ways to question systems, to make space for rhythm and collective imagery. Her work asks: how can we live together in ways that are more creative, more critical, and freer?
I, Hereby is not a one-off project, but ongoing research that re-emerge in different forms.
This project originates from a new program of the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) in collaboration with Schloss Moyland, in which thirteen artists conducted a month-long research in the Beuys archive.
Credits
Concept and performance | Michelle Samba
Photography | Heleen Haijtema
Thanks to | Station Noord, Explore the North, Tryater, We the North, Ministry of OCW, the Marina Abramović Institute, and Schloss Moyland.
