(b. 1976, Bern, Switzerland; lives and works in Paris)

This Mortal House Building 3 (2025)

This Mortal House Building 3 is a durational performance that unfolds in the historic heart of La Chapelle Salpêtrière throughout OFFSCREEN. Over six days, eight hours each day, the performance enacts the gradual construction of a spiral using 1440 uncooked bricks while blindfolded. The spiral, governed by the Fibonacci sequence, symbolizes the natural order, beauty, and harmony of the world. It represents journeys inward toward one’s core or outward into expanded consciousness. The work builds throughout the week, climaxing in its dramatic destruction on the last day of OFFSCREEN.

While the artist works blindfolded, the performance is filmed, exploring the tension between invisibility and a fractured, multiplicitous image. Employing numerous vantage points to achieve wide Kubrickian angles as well as tight close-ups, both of which create absences and tension, the experimental artist film aims to place the viewer in the artist’s skin throughout this extremely physical performance. The sound design intends to isolate key notes and rhythms during the performance, including the artist’s breath, expressions of physical pain, the sliding of feet and hands, the lifting and placing of uncooked bricks, and the powerful chamber of reverberated silence echoing off the walls and dome.

Maria Stamenković Herranz is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice merges performance, visual art, and embodied research. She investigates how ephemeral actions leave lasting traces in matter and collective memory, positioning performance as a tool for social transformation and a bridge between history, politics, and spirituality.

Through sculptural objects — such as the bricks in This Mortal House Building 1, 2 & 3 — she challenges the boundary between action and object, inviting audience engagement with evolving narratives. Recent exhibitions include Joseph Beuys Foundation at Schloss Moyland Museum (The Painted Heron, 2025), Librairie du Palais Gallery during the Arles Photo Festival (Arles, 2024), Paris Photo (Paris, 2023), March Art Project Gallery (Istanbul, 2022), Bangkok Art Biennale (Bangkok, 2021), Sakıp Sabancı Museum (Istanbul, 2020), and Benaki Museum (Athens, 2016). She has currently collaborated with Marina Abramović on a new performance work (2025–2026) that premiered at Manchester Factory International and travel to the Armory in New York.