Needless to say, we were all looking forward to the arrival of Marina Abramović to Usina de Arte, in the Zona da Mata Sul of Pernambuco. Despite the rich collection of large-scale works that the founders, Ricardo and Bruna Pessoa de Queiroz, display in their art park, until then they did not have a name as stellar as Marina among their attractions. We, the team Vogue Present there, we were waiting, with a mix of curiosity and apprehension, to carry out this test and get to know, first-hand, the site specific generator – her first public work in Brazil and throughout South America. Marc Pottier, curator of the Usina, calmed us: “She is sensational. Besides the fact that she is a superstar, she is a super normal person”. No sooner said than done. Marina has already arrived, dispensing with any ceremony or intermediated presentation. She walks up to me, extends her hand, looks me in the eyes and says: “Hi, I’m Marina”. He searches the house for a place, chooses one of the armchairs in the shade, on the generous balcony of the Plant’s main house and that’s how we begin our conversation.
I try to start talking about the work and its creation process, which took about two years, but Marina won’t let me continue. “First of all, I want to talk about my relationship with Brazil.” I had also been warned by Bruna: “With Marina it’s like this: she arrives and defines it. She doesn’t touch on topics, she is direct and objective.” Said and done again.
Marina’s first time in the country, she tells me in her firm, velvety voice, was not merely touristy. In 1988, the year before his first appearance, he had just completed the performance The Great Wall: Lovers at the Brink, with her then husband, the German artist Ulay, on the Great Wall of China, in which the couple covered 2.5 km of the structure. “On this long walk, I walked on different minerals and realized that the relationship between the ground and the minerals that form it is directly connected with our mind. When I finished, I went looking for the country that has the most minerals in the world, Brazil,” she explains.
So, she continues to narrate excitedly, she ended up on board a cargo plane that was even transporting donkeys, in Serra Pelada – “they called me crazy, they had just shot a cameraman who was filming Indiana Jones scenes there”, she recalls. Her focus, she emphasizes, was not gold. “I was interested in crystals: amethyst, hematite, rose quartz… From there, I went to Minas Gerais, Amazonia, I traveled the country from North to South. Looking for these stones, I not only discovered Brazil, but also defined my love for Brazilian culture, for its different forms and traditions”, she adds, who, inspired by her Brazilianist curiosity, launched in 2016, following her exhibition at Sesc Pompeia, the documentary Space Beyond – Marina Abramović and Brazil, in which he visited temples, shamans, drank ayahuasca, among other experiences that manifest, in some way, the existence of a spiritual world. “I’m interested in everything and I believe in everything. I like to experience, travel, see and live up close.”
The installation that Marina created for Usina de Arte draws directly from these two sources: both the performance in China and her research with minerals are visible in generator, consisting of a large wall three meters high, two and a half meters wide, and 25 meters long, with 12 sets of three rose quartz stones each (coming, of course, from Minas Gerais). The idea is for the public to place their heads, hearts and stomachs against the stones. “Rose quartz is the right material to open the heart to unconditional love”, he explains. “Ancient people use it in rituals”, he adds. Not surprisingly, the new work is installed on the top of a hill, the highest point in the entire park and 2 km from the entrance to the Plant. “My motto is: I give you the experience, but you have to give me your time. We are addicted, we can no longer live without a watch, without a computer, without a telephone. We never take the time to detox from everything. And that’s really one of the goals of this work, detoxing from technology.”
Testing the limits of the physical and psychological are an essential part of Marina, whether in her “transitory objects”, such as generator – “I don’t like to call them sculptures, because they don’t exist by themselves; the public has to interact with them and have their own experience” – as well as in his performance art, work that he has been developing since the 1970s and which he now transmits through workshops at the Marina Abramović Institute, currently based in Karyes, Greece . Among his most controversial performances are Rhythm Zero (1974), in which he stood motionless next to a series of objects available for public use – including guns and knives –, and The Artist Is Presentlasting 736 hours and 30 minutes (which would be equivalent to about a calendar month), in which she sat at a table, silent, in front of the audience, who could queue up to sit with her and stare at her for a few minutes, as part of her retrospective at MoMA in 2010. Thus, the artist was catapulted to the status of pop star, in art and beyond, breaking the public visitation record for a living artist at the museum (850 thousand people) and earned her the title of “mother” (or, as she calls herself, “grandmother”) of performance art.
At 77 years old, and recently recovered from a devastating setback she suffered after knee surgery that caused a pulmonary embolism and led her to a coma twice last year, Marina is also dedicated to testing the limits of longevity. “This horrible and unpredictable thing happened to me, but I use everything I learn in performance, concentration, breathing, exercises. I’m definitely focused on living past 100,” she says. “I don’t want to be sick and live long – I want to be healthy and live long. I never wanted to go back to my 20s or 30s, I was a mess. When we get older, we gain wisdom that we didn’t have. We were much happier.”
Following this philosophy, Marina recently launched, in partnership with Kazakh therapist Nonna Brenner, her skincare line. Longevity Method offers products in a limited edition of 8,000 units, which contain unusual components such as white bread, raw garlic bulbs and white wine, just to name a few. “I like to relive knowledge from the past that we forgot, from our grandparents. If you are sick, eat raw garlic and onion, they are the best medicine”, argues the Serbian artist based in New York, whose grandmother lived to be 103 years old.
The formula for all the energy doesn’t just come from there – love also enters the equation, she confesses. “Happiness is everything”, says Marina, who has been in a relationship with American film producer Todd Eckert, 21 years younger than her, for seven years. “I’ve always been with men who I try to change. And that’s a big problem,” she laughs. “But you get older and give up on that concept. Todd is American, but very different from others who don’t read, don’t go to the movies and search everything on Google. He is incredible, interesting and motivated”, he melts. “They say that when you go through menopause, you can’t have sex anymore. This is ridiculous. Sex gets better later.”
Another love that makes her eyes shine brightly, she makes a point of talking about, is fashion. “It’s a passion, but I’ve always been criticized for it,” she reflects. “I’m from the time when an artist wearing red lipstick, painting her nails and dressing well meant that she wanted to sleep with the museum director and didn’t have a serious job”, she says ironically, who, in the last year alone, starred in six magazine covers. magazines, including GQ German, from Vogue Portuguese and AnOther Magazine. Her appreciation for fashion is revealed even more when she takes us to the room where she was staying to show off her bags, full of looks that she created from her personal collection for our shoot. Among them, creations by Sonia Pinto from Minas Gerais, from Japanese labels Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto, plus a dress by also Serbian Roksanda Ilinčić, which she did not give up wearing in the shoot. “Fashion helps me to be more creative, and embody a different character every day”, she says, while, full of questions about the Brazilian scene, she chose with our stylist Sam Tavares the pieces she would wear.
As soon as she recovered from her health problem, Marina fell onto the road without looking back. She was the subject of a mega-retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which ended last month and is now in Amsterdam, having been the first female artist to win a solo show there in the more than 250 years of history of the English institution. “It was the best show of the year in the United Kingdom,” she says, without the slightest modesty. After inaugurating her monumental site specific at Usina de Arte, she will launch three books and is already working, alongside Luciana Brito, a gallerist from São Paulo who represents her in Brazil, on a new retrospective to tour Latin America starting next year , passing through Argentina, Mexico, Chile and, of course, Brazil. She is also in talks to debut at the Metropolitan in New York with her opera 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, a kind of tribute to the Greek soprano, and has also been working on a film with Chilean filmmaker Paul Larraín. The 2025 agenda is also already booked, with the premiere of a new project, scheduled for the Manchester International Festival, in England. “I am studying the concept of eroticism [nas culturas] from Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Greece and the Balkans to discover sexual rituals that ancient people practiced in order to connect to the universe. It has nothing to do with pornography, but it will probably be very scandalous”, he adds.
Physical and psychological resistance, hard work, natural supplementation, love, spiritual connection and ancestral wisdom – could these be the components that make Marina a tireless hurricane? “I will die working. The idea of retiring is the worst idea a human being can have,” she comments. “Retirement, what does that mean? Sit in front of the television and die? That won’t happen to me.” She didn’t even need to say it.
STYLING: Sam Tavares.
PHOTO ASSISTANTS: Matheus Lohan and Arthur Araújo.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION: Déia Lansky.
BEAUTY: Mariana Galhardo. BEAUTY ASSISTANT: Gabriela Gomes Alencar.
PHOTO PROCESSING: Vetro Retouch.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Loc Audiovisual, Usina de Arte and Luciana Brito Galeria.
