© Photo Valentino Bianchi
THIS MORTAL HOUSE BUILDING 3
In dialogue with Maria Stamenković Herranz
FVTVRIST Magazine // November 22, 2025
Over 7 consecutive days, eight hours per day, Maria Stamenković Herranz built a spiral structure from 1,440 uncooked bricks, blindfolded, following the Fibonacci sequence, a ritual of endurance, precision, and surrender. Presented at La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière within the OFFSCREEN 2025 program, This Mortal House Building 3 extends her long-term investigation into material, time, and the sacred geometry of process. In this conversation, she reflects on intuition, architecture, sound, destruction, and the deep interiority of long-durational performance.
Portrait of Maria Stamenković Herranz. © Photo Valentino Bianchi
La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, Paris, 2025 — OFFSCREEN 2025
I have been thinking a lot about This Mortal House Building 3, and I am excited to hear how it felt for you from the inside. When I watched it, it felt less like construction and more like devotion. What drew you to working with the Fibonacci sequence and the spiral?
The Fibonacci sequence is a form that appears constantly in nature. Earlier this year, I carried a living sunflower on my back from Serbia to Germany during my filmed road performance, The Painted Heron.The sunflower symbolizes many things. It is among the first plants used in post-war landscapes because it extracts toxins from the soil.
During that journey I had a kind of daily conversation with the plant. I started noticing the spiral pattern inside it, something close to the Fibonacci sequence, the quiet spiral you find in shells and in the turning of galaxies. Nature uses it to harmonize space. Under the weight of the chapel’s history, building a Fibonacci spiral beneath the dome felt like a way to realign the energy of the place.
© Photo Valentino Bianchi
There were 1,440 bricks, the same number as minutes in a day. Was that intentional?
I calculated 1,440 bricks, but not for that reason. It is beautiful that you noticed. With seven days of work, that is simply how everything aligned. It’s not mathematically the golden ratio, but it behaves with the same kind of natural order. I am not a Pythagoras person, but I use mathematics in construction. Things align. That is nature. The more I investigate, the more everything aligns.
Did it change the way you moved or how time passed for you?
Not really. I move with my hands, and my hands move me. The spiral moves me too. Its construction is already so harmonious that it carries me through. That is why feng shui exists in architecture. Space shapes how energy moves.
The chapel was built on a Greek cross, not a Western one. The Greek cross proposes harmony, with small chapels around and the meeting point in the center.
The spiral is such an ancient form. For you, is it rising outward or going inward?
Both. That is the beauty of the spiral, it can continue endlessly. The Fibonacci sequence drew me in because it moves toward the golden ratio. If I kept building, I would keep approaching it. Fibonacci is a path toward the golden ratio. It is like time. It never stops.
Performance is time based. I must stop when the time ends. That is why I like building. The labyrinth was the same. It could have grown endlessly. I like shapes that move with time. If nobody stops me, I continue. Imagine building for a year with the people in a city. The spiral could go on and on.
You worked eight hours a day for seven days. That is an intense relationship with time and silence. What happens to you inside that duration?
I am incredibly present. Everything is calculated in an organic way. One brick takes about two minutes. That is how I know how many I can place in a day and whether I will finish. I finished exactly what I wanted on the last day.
While I am focused on building, all my other senses heighten. My touch becomes very strong. My fingers become my eyes. Every finger sees. Everything I touch is information. My hearing sharpens. My sense of smell too. I smelled each person’s perfume. It gave me imagination. I pictured how they might look from the scent they chose. I love that. It opens space to imagine life differently.
The sound was a cacophony. Almost like Stravinsky. If I had had a piano, I would have tried to recreate it.
So when one sense is removed, everything else amplifies.
Yes. In Istanbul I could recognize people from their steps or their smell. I would ask, “Were you on the left side earlier?” and they would say yes. I smelled them.
© Photo Allyn Aglaïa
So the investigation continues after the performance. Did it feel like you were creating a kind of sacred architecture?
Absolutely. Many architects come to me. But for me, nature is already sacred. I just need to be there and let it illuminate itself.
My work often freezes a subject or a moment. When you focus on one thing only, it becomes deeper, like diving into the sea. The deeper you go, the more you see.
By diving in myself, others can decide whether they want to go inside or stay outside. That is what I love about performance. The visitor chooses how far to go. Many stay longer than they expect. They are drawn in because they need contemplation.
We have lost contemplation. Sunday used to be a day when nothing was produced. Our bodies need that. Long duration freezes time. People stay longer because they need to. Then things settle on their own, because that is how nature works.
And when you are blindfolded and must build, what do you start to «see»?
I write about this in the book. In Istanbul I built the labyrinth for four weeks. Something in my vision changed. I am aware that being able to take away my sight is a privilege that others don’t have. I respect those who cannot see.
The brain works differently. I can see, so my mind already has images. When I touch a rough brick, the image in my mind collaborates with what I feel. It is a constant conversation between memory and sensation.
Darkness is never pitch black. It is grayish. In Paris people used flash. When the flash went off, something moved inside my eyes. I perceived red. It felt like a shock. I want to explore this in the future. With eyes closed, flash becomes a physical experience.
Turning a long-durational performance into a book is a big shift How did you approach translating that process into a book? And what did writing it teach you about the performance itself?Natural. Destroying the labyrinth revealed another performance inside the destruction, a heightened meaning. The images were powerful. I grew up during the Balkan wars, and those images keep coming back to me. Also, mythological storytelling emerged. At times I saw Escher’s paintings. I saw castles from the stories I read as a child. Images just flooded out like a river.
I wrote every day in Istanbul. The war made me a contemporary artist. At that time, I studied classical Russian ballet, but contemporary art became necessary for me to breathe and make sense of the world. As a teenager, I often experienced events in real life and later saw them narrated differently on television. That contrast changed something in me. It shaped how I perceived reality, and it was the moment when innocence naturally fell away.
How do you leave stories behind? How do you narrate what you have seen? Performance is ephemeral, but the trace is mine to create if I want to afterwards. And this time, I felt a strong need that I was ready to leave a trace, therefore I needed to make a book.
I met Yann Linsart, the publisher and editor of the book. He asked how I envisioned the book. I said I wanted an active reader, not a passive one. I wanted the book to require the presence of the reader.
The book has two ways of being read or experienced. You must open it, close it, assemble it. You must find your own system. This mirrors something in how each performer finds their own method, rhythm, and protocols. My aim was for the reader to become present.
© Photo Allyn Aglaïa
The chapel has its presence. How did the space shape the work for you?
Enormously. Being inside that history creates a dialogue between past and present. That is why contemplation matters. The chapel was also a place where women were observed. A chapel is meant to be a place where one feels safe. Imagine how violent that must have been.
This makes me rethink how we treat bodies, especially female bodies, in the name of science.
DESTROYING THE LABYRINTH REVEALED ANOTHER PERFORMANCE INSIDE THE DESTRUCTION, A HEIGHTENED MEANING. THE IMAGES WERE POWERFUL.
When you destroyed the structure after seven days, what did you feel?
This was the second time I built and destroyed. On the last day, I removed the blindfold and looked up to the dome, to the center. Usually, people look up for relief, for joy, for help. At times, I heard birds up there. I asked everyone if they heard them, nobody did. I don’t know, but I felt as if the birds were soothing me, letting me know there was no rain, so I could better deal with the cold. I could hear vertically so strongly.
The body looks up when it needs light or regeneration. So, I opened myself toward above. My instinct wanted it. I needed it to face the purpose and the force to destroy.
I opened my eyes very slowly. After hours closed, the muscles do not work. I looked at the center point to take in the light. With all that history, knowing how many had looked up before, I felt the moment, and I had to destroy. It felt like a release, for them, for all that physical and emotional traces left behid, and for gaining some agency.
Are you imagining a book for Building 3?
Not now. Maybe a volume with all of them, perhaps one day. Each space proposes a new shape of construction. The work speaks in connection with the space and the city. Sometimes I daydream about how I would love to do it when I am old. I think showing the body in age is beautiful. We rarely see older women artists’ bodies in performance that often.
For now, I am working on the film with Dustin Lynn. He is editing as we speak, and we hope to premiere it this year. On the last day, we used a drone. Among other things, we also used the iPhone 17 because we could place it directly on the bricks. My filmmaker moves like a cat, I could not feel him, and this was fantastic! It meant he was completely in tune with the energy that was present. Suddenly, I sensed a phone. He was, in fact, seeing for me.
We talked so much about what I wanted. I wanted intimacy. In Istanbul, I let the audience enter only during the last couple of hours, but here the approach was different. OFFSCREEN is an image-based event, so when speaking to Allyn Aglaïa and Julien Frydman, who curated and invited me to this year’s program, I knew that narration had to include a visual aspect and a trace. My father had a deep passion for photography, Super 8, and video, and I grew up watching him edit at home or project what he filmed that day.
Do you think you will do more Mortal Houses?
I do not know. Something might happen, but it is not confirmed. I would love to do it at the Venice Biennale or in a desert. A space that contains either buildings in bricks, and a city charged of history or a obsolite space where the soundscape and smells are unknown to me. Perfect. But I did not plan number three either. The space or the city must speak to me. When it does, then I know that I must do it.
© Photo Allyn Aglaïa
NOTES FROM THE ARTIST
Text: Maria Stamenković Herranz
It used to smell of humidity and cold stone, unwashed linen, sweat, bodies confined for long periods, old wood, dust, wax from floors, phenol, vinegar, carbolic acid, herbs, the earth of the courtyards… La Salpêtrière holds that in its walls.
A ray of light pouring through stained glass might have heightened these smells, probably unbearable, yet a ray of light is warmth, hope, salvation, and, physically, liberation.
Seeing was not how I wanted to meet the space face to face. It was my way of rebellion with the past. By confining my eyes, my sense of smell awakened. The space transformed into presence, together with the visitors.
Their perfumes, their jackets, a glass of wine, a scarf borrowed last minute from their grandmother, an autumn coat waiting for a year in the cupboard, all of these became quantum-style traces, momentary signatures of proximity.
Even when particles disappear, their interactions leave measurable footprints: in light, in energy, in other particles. This decoherence, the world full of silent leftovers from every encounter, is how presence lingers.
Everything leaves a trace, even when we do not see it. Observation itself creates the trace. A trace appears whenever a system interacts with its environment, the momentary light, the molecules, another body, an object. A trace is born of relationship: contact, presence, friction.
In this heavily loaded historical citadel of confinement, a chapel once serving as a city for segregation, where eventually medical spectacles were performed, I purposefully took away my sight. And in developing hyperosmia, I came face to face not only with the remains of the performed event but with the imprint of its passing.
© Photo Allyn Aglaïa
About Maria Stamenković Herranz
Maria Stamenković Herranz is a Spanish–Serbian interdisciplinary performance artist whose practice spans three decades and bridges choreography, theatre, visual art, and long-durational performance. A graduate of the Rambert School of Ballet & Contemporary Dance in London and the Maggie Flanigan Acting Studio in New York, she approaches the body not only as medium, but as her primary material.
Herranz’s work interrogates myth, cultural narrative, and embodied memory, reinserting the contemporary body into architecture, time, and ritual space. Since 1998, she has exhibited and performed internationally, developing an unmistakable vocabulary defined by endurance, repetition, blindness, and tactile perception.
Her landmark project This Mortal House Building 1 (Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul, 2020) established the foundational grammar of this ongoing cycle. Over 24 days she constructed a labyrinth of 5,250 bricks while blindfolded, engaging the body in a form of somatic mapping, inner vision, and architectural inscription.
With This Mortal House Building 3, Herranz expanded this trajectory. Commissioned by OFFSCREEN Paris, the work unfolded over seven days and fifty-six blindfolded hours inside La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière. She constructed a spiral of 1,440 uncooked bricks, one for each minute of a day, following the Fibonacci sequence. The piece deepens her exploration of sacred geometry, sensory perception, and the body’s capacity to build time as material.
Across performance, film, writing, and photography, Herranz positions the body as a “mortal house,” a vessel of resilience, imagination, and memory. Her work invites viewers into states of contemplation and heightened awareness, revealing time not as duration but as structure — something that can be built, dismantled, and lived through the body.
