Marina Abramović

I actually tried not to because what’s going on is so upsetting. I did everything: watch television, read the news, etc. So I decided that the best thing to do was switch everything off. Trump is making decisions hourly, not every week or month; literally every hour. So constantly, you have something going on. The only exit out of this situation is to concentrate on my work and my friends, and I do so the best I can.
It’s the most imbalanced moment in human history right now. It’s not just the US; it’s France, it’s Germany, it’s England — it’s everywhere. Altogether, it’s a mess. Everything was going well with the transgender community, but now we’re going into the absolute Dark Ages again, we’re going backwards. Rick Owens said something about how you have to work, work, and concentrate on your work. I completely agree with the statement. 

First of all, I don’t think anything terrible will change till I die because I’ll be eighty next year. But it’s incredible how much we don’t care about this beautiful, blue planet we are living in. That’s scary. But at the same time, never in the history of humanity were there eight billion people, so I think the planet just wants to shake us off because it’s had enough of us. It’s just too much.
We also proved that during Covid. It was the moment where we could’ve improved the levels of pollution, energy consumption, a lot of stuff. There is a solution, it’s only humans that have to make the decision. But it looks like only a big catastrophe can wake us up.
It also happens to us as individuals: people never change without some sort of drama: their own personal illness, an accident, or something fatal; then you think about yourself and make some radical change. Because change needs to come from each of us, and nobody’s ready to do that.
People think that what’s happening is someone else’s fault and they just complain. I am done with complaining. For example, my statement in Glastonbury was seven minutes of silence. That was my statement to humans. If you want to change something, start from yourself.

It’s not. We are hopeless. We can’t just change shit, my dear. That’s the truth. I mean, look at this incredible thing that’s happening in Serbia. I don’t know if you follow this, but the situation with the students there, they’ve been doing silent demonstrations since November. This is six months already! Without violence, just complete silence in order to change the government and stop corruption. The farmers are helping them, the citizens are helping them. It’s unbelievable. Now they went all the way to the European Union. I don’t know what will happen. They’re figuring out how with silence and non-violent protesting things can be changed. And still, they’re not able to. They’re my heroes today, but they’re not able.

Honestly, we have to see reality. The entire world is run by two hundred and fifty billionaires, even politicians are their puppets. These people decided that we can’t use natural energy and have to use oil instead, and to get oil, we have to dig from the ground. And this is all so they can be rich. Everything is related to that. Art can’t change anything, artists can’t. They can only raise awareness, but that awareness then has to evolve into revolution. And revolution is never without violence.
Gandhi is the only one I know who ever made a revolution without a drop of blood. He was an example of modesty, of being radical, of being completely not corrupt, and living an extremely simple life. We don’t have any kind of presence like that right now. Just the opposite. 

I write my dreams. Also, in my old artwork, when I was a painter, I used to wake up in the morning and paint my dreams. I had very vivid dreams, all in colour. It’s such a simple way, painting them. I also made the Dream House in Japan years ago, in the north of Tokyo. It’s only four rooms, and they’re always booked. People can go there to dream and write it down, it’s part of the artistic project.
But the older you get, the less dreams you have. It’s very interesting. And also, we dream less and less because of stress, insomnia, taking drugs, and all sorts of technology: TV, smartphones, computers. Dreams are disrupted because of that. And I think they’re important messages to your subconscious, they help you understand things about your intuition. I very much respect my dreams, although they’re not always important. Some are just daydreams, but others can predict my future and show me the way to do things. 
So, dreaming is something that our civilisation is losing, and it’s all because of technology. If we develop it more, we’ll reach a point when we won’t be able to control it anymore. Very soon, we will not control artificial intelligence. All of the things there were science fiction in the 70s are a reality today.

Not to me, but to humanity. 

I remember at a dinner I was attending, a Nobel Prize winner made a toast — that was a long time ago — and he said that if humans didn’t go back to simplicity, technology and AI would take over, that we could be out of control completely. I think that’s what’s going to happen. It looks like evolution and that it’s unstoppable; but we can stop, it’s just that we’re not doing it because our addiction to technology is greater than our ability to stop disasters.

I was so interested in looking into the past. Not just the rituals with my grandmother, but those of Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Greece, Serbia, all of our countries. They’re really pagan and they’re using explicit sexual organs: phalluses, vaginas, in order to connect to God and to the mystery of nature.
We still don’t know where life comes from. We don’t know anything about black holes. We don’t know anything about the universe. We don’t know shit about anything, basically. So for me, it was very interesting to go into these rituals and bring them back to the present. Because today, every time we see a naked body, we immediately identify it as pornography. But there is so much stuff that can be discovered and taken away from ancient rituals, interpret them differently today and make them really poetical. So this work is probably going to be a scandal, I’m totally sure, because I am showing rituals from such old, old, old ways.

For example, if there were floods and lots of rain, the old women from the village would run to the field showing their vagina to scare the gods and stop the rain. How is it possible that the power of the vagina scares the gods? It’s unbelievable as a statement already. There’s another very old ritual happening not in our countries but others where men go and copulate with the ground in order for the crops to grow. It’s incredible. It looks very primitive but also incredibly strong.
There is another interesting ritual where if a young boy dies before being married, the corpse can’t be buried until it’s married to the most beautiful woman from the village. After the marriage, the corpse can be buried and the woman should stay unmarried for one year, then she can re-marry in a normal way. There are other things about orgies with skeletons and graveyards.

I’m going to repeat all of them with dancers and performers in this very large factory space. It’s going to be about a hundred people, probably the biggest project I’ve ever made, and everything’s happening for hours. The audience have to go between fourteen stages where performances will be happening at the same time. So each time, you will see and discover something different. I’m recreating these rituals and giving them a contemporary view. 

We’ve been working on this performance for two years already. We have to work separately: with the choreographer, with the musicians, with the performers, with the casting, with the filming for the video part installation, with the designer… it’s insane. And then we’re taking two months, September and October, in Manchester to put everything together with rehearsals. So we work on separate elements, and then we put all these elements together in two months and make the final piece.
After that, the piece has to travel to different places. And we have two different versions of that. We have the four-hour version, that we can only show in very large factory spaces like the one in Manchester, also The Armory in New York City, and then in Bochum, Germany. But then we also have the Berlin Opera, another opera in Barcelona. All of these near-normal theatres will have a stage version that will be two hours long and a bit different. So we are preparing simultaneously two completely separate versions of the same work.

Now it’s kind of blossoming. I wake up in the morning and all I do is work. But it’s been fifty-five years like this. I am definitely not lazy. I have to admit though that I am now in the countryside, just for two days, for a little resting, which is fantastic. The English really know how to make gardens. It’s so beautiful!

We went to the seaside, and it was rough. We ate fresh fish from the sea, and crab, and stuff like that. But we had to wait almost two hours, that’s why I missed your call earlier.

You are?

You’re Catalan and not eating jamón? 

But you live in London? 

I’ve just been there. I love Mexico!

I was in the Barragán Foundation doing some workshop. Mexico is such a good vibe now. So many good people, young people. Lots of interesting things are happening. And the food is over the top. Nobody talks about Trump there. Meanwhile, I’ve never seen a shittier, dirtier place than New York City right now. But Mexico is super clean, it felt like another world. I was in an area called Roma, and I thought that I should get something there. I just want to leave bloody New York as soon as possible. How are you as a Catalan in Mexico?

And how did you choose Mexico?

Do you know Pilar? 

Yeah. 

I really like her. Such a beautiful woman, such good energy. There’s so much good stuff there, I was impressed. I was in Mexico twenty-two or twenty-three years ago, and it was completely different. Now it’s the right place. But after Covid, so many Americans came to Mexico and they stayed there. I’m looking forward to having a show at MUAC, but that’ll probably be by the end of 2026 or 2027. But I’m really wanting to go back.

I am booked completely until 2058, my dear (laughs). Next year I’m turning eighty, and a friend of mine who makes documentary films told me that he really wanted to make an eightieth-birthday film about me. And I said, I don’t want it, it’s too early. Can we do ninety? And he replied, “I have never ever heard anybody refuse eighty as too early! I’m fifty-four and I feel so old, how do you do it?” But I don’t think about that. I just work, really. 

I don’t think in those terms. But I would never go back to your age, I suffered too much, life was so difficult. I don’t want that period. I like the now. The only thing I’m really taking care of is my health. I just had my knee replaced, by the way, I have a titanium knee since three months ago. I have something now that I would never give up: wisdom.
Wisdom of old age is fantastic because you don’t get emotional bullshit, you don’t suffer from stupid things, and you don’t waste time because you don’t have much time left. I’m very focused. I love this more. I’m happier now. Not just happier, I’m more like a real me, more stable, without doubts. That’s a big difference. But you have to be healthy and old; sick and old sucks (laughs).

It’s so funny because now that I’m at that age, I’m doing more fashion magazine covers than I ever did. And some people tell me, you’re an artist, what are you doing? Fashion? This is bullshit. But I say, you know what? I’m enjoying it so much! I make art, I make fashion, I make opera, I make work on an erotic epic. I don’t care. I do what I have freedom to do, regardless of what other people think.

But it’s always been like this. When I didn’t do any fashion or any of this, when I was doing my performance work in the 70s, I still received so many bad criticisms against me. It was terrible. If I had taken them seriously, I wouldn’t even have left the house. And now, all of the work that I did is in museums. They will always have something to criticise, even if it’s my red nail polish. So they can go to hell. I don’t care.

I don’t. I’d hate to be nostalgic, I don’t look at the past. I don’t have time to do so. I’m living in the now, perfectly as it is. The past is the past. You have to look into the present. Everything’s changed: the politics, society. And you have to create work that reflects that. If you put me in a box, I will always escape from that; I’m always doing something else.
When I was doing opera, everybody said to me, are you crazy? It’s such an old-fashioned world. What do you have to do? But I was missing something, and I brought to the opera a new generation of artists as well as a new generation of public. A young generation that had never been in the opera house before. Now I have fourteen-year-old kids come to me and say, you changed my life! I mean, I love it. But how can I have changed your life? You’re only fucking fourteen (laughs)! It’s crazy. 

Young people really understand what I do and they bring their parents to see my work, which is completely crazy. Or just now, with my partner Todd [Eckert], we were in the train station in London waiting to leave the city for the countryside. He went to a little shop there to grab a tuna sandwich and some water for the trip, and he came back and said, “I didn’t pay for any of this.” I asked why, and he replied that the vendor asked him if he was with this woman, Marina. Todd replied “Yes”, and the vendor said, “She is my favourite artist. I don’t want to charge you anything.” And that happened here in the Central Station in London. So I went to meet the guy and he is an artist from Ukraine. But that’s something that happens to me on a daily basis. 
I don’t know if that happens to Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons, I’m not sure. But it happens to me very often. There is something about my work that gets people attached emotionally. Because I deal with emotions on the deepest level.

And also, the press and media likes to change things so much. I was helping this doctor from Kazakhstan who cured my Lyme disease and created immune system drops for my energy and allergies and put my name on it. So I received huge criticism because the papers said I was doing rejuvenation creams. I’m not doing any rejuvenation creams! I’m doing something that is good for us. You feel you’re getting old, so you need energy and a stronger immune system. That has nothing to do with beauty. It’s a duty with health. But that was immediately translated into the cheap thing, like, look what she’s doing now. 
Also, British culture is completely based on tabloids. They love bad titles because it’s the only way people read them. Otherwise, the newspapers don’t sell. And I know I can provide them with that kind of content. For example, when I had the show at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2023, I was the first woman in over two hundred and fifty years to exhibit there, in the main space. No woman before me had ever done that. But they received anonymous letters saying that what I do isn’t art; that I’m presenting the degradation of a nation. So immediately, I made a t-shirt saying “the degradation of the nation!”

There’s this wonderful book about negative criticism throughout history. When Beethoven composed the “Fifth Symphony”, it was criticised as the worst piece of music. Or the Eiffel Tower, it was the ugliest sculpture in Paris and people asked for it to be destroyed. And now, it’s a symbol of the city. So you have to follow your intuition. Performance was never recognised, it’s taken me fifty-five years for people to believe in a medium that nobody else thought of as art. You have to have balls to do that.

I don’t like pain in private life, I’m not interested in it. I love pleasure. I love to enjoy my life. But I think it’s so important to understand pain because I’ve always related to ancient rituals and culture. They made ceremonies so extremely difficult, both mentally and physically, that they even went to clinical death sometimes in order to create a state of consciousness to understand the meaning of life. So I staged these painful moments with the public. I have to show the audience that if I can go through this and liberate myself from the fear of pain, they can do the same. That’s the real reason, actually showing that pain is a door to secrets. Once you understand what pain is, it stops existing.
There are also the taboos of sex and pornography, which I’m interested to explore in the show. I’m also making a book with Laurence King Publishing at the end of next year about “Balkan Erotic Epic”, and I’m only going to publish negative criticism. Nothing positive. If you write anything positive, I’m not publishing it.

I want to show negative criticism for people to realise how ridiculous it is. We’re trapped in political correctness, we don’t see the truth anymore. Everything is criticised, it’s insane. Everything we were doing in the 70s, it’d be impossible to do today. We’d be forbidden.

Ok, but look at what’s happening with the Leigh Bowery show at the Tate. Did you go to see it?

It’s something incredible. It shows how he dealt with it: gay, transgender, all this culture. We are talking about the 80s and 90s. It was so provocative, so incredibly original, so great. And today people are so happy to see the work. The Tate is full, full, full. Because it’s completely controversial right now. But that was something the public needed because we are so restricted with everything, really. In those days, everything was possible, whether society accepted it or not. We were doing it anyway, you know?

First of all, the MAI Institute is my legacy. I’ve fought so badly for performance to become mainstream, and I succeeded. I wanted young artists to have this platform ready and also to learn whatever I’ve learned in my really difficult life in a much easier way. 

The one thing that I discovered in my practice is that the long durational work is absolutely transformative. This is where artists change themselves, and also where the audience changes with them. If you do something one or two hours, you can still play somebody else. But if you do something, let’s say, eight hours a day for a month, it becomes life itself. You can’t pretend. You show a true reality. You become incredibly vulnerable, and the public connects with that because they’re vulnerable too. And then they like to support you. They bring their friends, and friends of friends.
So the big difference is that for any show, you might go once or twice. But for this one, you go every day because the artists need you in order to continue and finish the work. This becomes an art community that supports the energy of the artists and is incredibly interesting. 
At MAI Institute, we teach the Abramović method. We train artists to do long durational work, but they have to bring their own practice. I’m not doing work for them, I’m just giving them tools to perform. Because you must have extra mental and physical power to avoid injuries and stuff. And then for my eightieth birthday, I want to establish a performance award in my name because performance art needs to be awarded an artist in residence programme or something similar. I really want to put my own life to maintain that form of art. I want it to live forever.

They’re always working, they’re incredibly successful and making great work themselves. I remember this really interesting Japanese artist, Chiharu Shiota, she’s everywhere now, in all the museums. She’ll also be at the Venice Biennale. But when she came to study with me in Germany, she was this tiny, timid girl. She collected wisdom teeth for over a year from different dentists; she’d go to their place and collect their patients’ wisdom teeth. When she had thousands, she’d sit in the corner with a little machine poking holes at them and connecting them with fisherman wires to create a dress. When it was finished, she put it on and just dropped on the floor. The dress weighed around two hundred kilos! But immediately, I knew her talent is special. And she was so focused on the work, totally dedicated.  

In early pieces, she would lie there for months inside that kind of material. Another artist, Miles Greenberg, was doing very well too. I met him when he was seventeen years old, and I knew immediately that he had the guts. Carlos Martiel, another fantastic artist, he’s Cuban. There are lots of them. I have a huge list. At MAI Institute, we have artists from over thirty-four countries and they’re all sorts of genders, ethnicities, etc. It’s very important.

Grandmother sounds so miserable. Godmother also. And I’m not a mother of any kid, I didn’t want to have children. I just want to have the art. And so a warrior is what I’ve been. I was constantly breaking walls. I was the first woman in the Royal Academy to have a show ever. I’m doing a show in the Accademia di Belle Arti at the Venice Biennale this year, and I’m also the first woman to do so in that building. Whatever I do, I’m always the first woman somewhere. I feel like a bulldozer. I’d like to be the tractor or bulldozer, anything but godmother. Just don’t mention it.

I really hate it. It sounds so old. Eighty is too early; eighties are the new forties. 

You know, my grandmother was a hundred and eight. It’s true. Also, I hope we meet at some point in life.

I’m definitely coming back to do a show, which I’m very interested in.

It’s so young and full of energy. So great. Plus, you have incredible filmmakers. Iñárritu, he’s unbelievable. I mean, two Oscars, one after the other. Who can compete with that. And then, the other guy, from “Roma”.

Yeah. It was wonderful too. And then spread to new ones that we have to discover. And there is a performance festival now, what is the name of it?

Yes. We’re actually in contact with the organiser [Sam Ozer] because we would like to work together with MAI Institute with her. I’m always looking for new stuff.

Yeah, he was there with someone from the Soumaya museum. He told me he loves Mexico and that he wants to live there. 

Alright, my dear. I’m going to drink tea in the sun.