Schloss Moyland Nordrhein Westfalen
I sit at a white table.
Each day begins with a wound.
I draw my own blood and press it into paper institutes no longer need.
In front of me are a set of stamps I designed.
The stamps I use are not metaphors.
They determine.
Like signatures or cancellations. They are decisions.
Every stamp alters the status of what it touches.
The space is reduced to its function.
Performer, chair, table, paper, stamp pads, stamps.
The work takes place in silence.
In I, Hereby, I merge rhythm, ritual, and material. For six days, in a self-created setting consisting of a table, chair, stacks of paper, and hand-cut stamps, I stamps papers with her own blood.
I, Hereby emerged from various strands: a research in the archive of Joseph Beuys, my earlier performance series Hit Me Baby, re-performances by Marina Abramović, my interactive installation Gateways at Oerol, and my research into etchings and linocuts.
Along with twelve other artists, and by invitation of the Marina Abramovic Institute, I was able to do a research into the archival material related to Beuys’s life and work. We listened to MAI talks: talks from researchers, former colleagues and students of Beuys, and we shared food, notes, walks, and ideas. The performances we developed will be on display in July 2025 at Schloss Moyland.
Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986) was a versatile artist who left a strong mark on contemporary art movements, and connected art and politics with performance, grease, and felt.
Like Beuys, I use my own materials: body, blood, and discarded institutional paper.
The MAI talks speakers all emphasised Beuys’ relation to Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925) who was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. My initial research revolved around the influence of Rudolf Steiner on Beuys’ energy systems, and how the assumptions in those systems structure bodies in form, function, and potential. This direction proved difficult within the institution, so I turned away from the metaphysical, and toward the administrative. I asked myself: what gesture could hold symbolic charge, but appear entirely benign?
I started to study Beuys’ stamps.
During the 1972 edition of documenta in Kassel (documenta 5), Joseph Beuys established the Büro für Direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung, an office through which he promoted grassroots democracy by referendum. The bureau operated with real materials: desks, staff, printed pamphlets, conversation. Central to its legitimacy were rubber stamps bearing slogans, seals, and contact information. These were not props; they functioned like institutional signatures, granting weight and credibility to what was, in essence, an invented structure.
Already in the late 1960s, during his Fluxus years, Beuys produced round and rectangular stamps with names of fictional offices, slogans like “Ich kenne kein Weekend,” or his own name marked with a cross. Stamped in black, red, or green on drawings, posters, paper bags, invitations, they resembled the stamps of East German administration, looking very serious and official, yet they were used to recode the ordinary, to propel everyday objects into another symbolic register. In works like Wirtschaftswerte (1977) or the “Honey is flowing in all directions” postcard edition, the stamp operates not as signature but as redefinition.
One example with the same logic, though without a stamp, is Intuition (1968), a multiple produced with publisher Wolfgang Feelisch. Thousands of identical pinewood boxes, each marked with the word “Intuition” in pencil. That word, handwritten, was enough to shift the box’s function. It wasn’t sculpture or metaphor. It was declared. Just as a seal transforms a form into an official document, Beuys’ handwriting turned the box into an active proposition.
The stamp Hauptstrom, introduced in the mid-1970s, was different. It was a work by itself: arrows, wedges, magnetic poles, planetary axes. Beuys applied it in red and green pigment, or in Braunkreuz, his self-made mixture of rust-proofing oil and iron oxide. While Braunkreuz itself was not blood, Beuys sometimes incorporated his own blood into drawings and actions, always as a material charged with meaning. For him, the stamp operated somewhere between diagram and transmitter.
This focus on energy systems, rooted in part in Steiner’s vision of invisible forces shaping the body, disturbed and fascinated me. But there was something else: the idea, coming also from theosophy and writers like Blavatsky (who is central to Marina Abramović), that the body might be more than biography, that material and gesture can transmit forces we don’t see. My own body becomes material, both archive and carrier of history: Congolese father, Frisian mother, institutional paper under my hands, my own blood as the ink. The stamp here does not just define status, but pushes fragments of biography and bureaucracy into a different register.
Where Beuys charged his materials with mythic energy with felt, fat, iron oxide, sometimes his own blood, I do not claim a universal gesture. My blood is my own, drawn from a body standing at the crossing of histories, pressed into paper once sanctioned by institutions. The act is both trivial and loaded. It marks the limits of metaphor.
Stamping, in Beuys’ practice, was never decorative or merely parody. It functioned as activation, as a customs stamp lets a passport travel or a postmark cancels value. The stamp defines status. It confirms something or withdraws it. Beuys made that mechanism sculptural.
After the residency I began making stamps. Not to reproduce his, but to build my own grammar. Each stamp sits on the table in my performance. I apply them.
Concept and performance | Michelle Samba
With support of | Station Noord, Explore the North, Tryater, We the North, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Marina Abramović Institute, and Schloss Moyland.
