Bettina Samson

Bettina Samson was born in 1978 in Paris (FR), she lives and works in Marseille and Paris (FR)

To attempt (though why attempt it?) to circumscribe the proliferating territory of Bettina Samson’s speculations, one might borrow the title of a work by Matt Mullican: More details from an imaginary Universe. For the insular form she has often used to physically and metaphorically delimit her research is less a way of offering a synthetic, reassuring view of a closed universe than a means of hypertrophying a detail and projecting the viewer into a microcosm teeming with visual and haptic information—drawing simultaneously from geology, biology, economics… spheres in mutual contamination.

If one must name references, echoes of Hybert or Barney can be found in these outgrowths, extensions, inflations and deflations which, in Samson’s work, generate mutant, hyper-sexed organisms caught between swelling and detumescence. We perceive only the surface, a zone of excitability, like skin raw with scratches in her video Hyperf-e. Excitation becomes an endlessly prolonged substitute for pleasure, a response to the constant erotic overstimulation of priapic, liberal abundance.

The Virgin Islands—former utopian mythologies with libertarian connotations (cf. Hakim Bey), now exotic tax havens—have served as a privileged allegorical territory for these deregulated mutations. Their politics of (banking) secrecy suited the clandestine cabinets where Samson’s setups found shelter. Her more recent works communicate outwardly, taking on the forms of booths or vehicles. They seem, for now, to stabilize, to gain autonomy as concretions (her tar drippings shaped like tattoos), but their threads are always traced in a prolific production of drawings—laboratories of filamentous, umbilical forms that later emerge, sometimes anamorphosed, into three dimensions: they swell, they ooze, they stick, they suction—like intestinal flora in expansion.

Neither offensive nor defensive, these forms seem to model for Samson an embodiment of femininity that she describes as “infra- or post-human,” like the mermaid in the video Rhode Island Road Movie, degenerated into a sexy but languid cover-girl, no longer inclined to sing, her mouth full of seaweed, her eyes glassy—a pathetic sideshow creature trapped in The Love Boat.
“I am not the Lorelei,” she says; “I am beyond History, both submissive and unreachable; touch me, but you will never know me.”

Such is the operating mode of Samson’s laboratories: in a dialectic of the familiar and the indecipherable, zones where polarities collapse—strange attractors on the path to entropy—where imperceptible nebulae of microbes still swarm.

— Text by François Piron