Marina Abramovic Glastonbury seven minutes of silence

Glastonbury Festival is in full swing as international visitors descend on Somerset for five days of love, dancing and debauchery. The event, which has been running for over 50 years, took a slightly unusual turn today as renowned Serbian artist Marina Abramović attempted to ask the audience on the Pyramid Stage, one of the noisiest areas of the park, to remain silent for seven minutes.

Internationally recognized for her bold conceptual works, Abramović invited audiences to sit and watch her for eight hours a day for nearly three months in 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Wearing a white dress with a peace sign on stage, her latest intervention aims to raise awareness of this “dark moment,” the artist said in a statement, regarding the current sociopolitical order. “I don’t know of any visual artist who has done something like this in front of 175,000 to 200,000 people,” Abramović told the Guardian“The biggest audience I’ve ever had was 6,000 people in a stadium and I was like ‘wow’, but this is really beyond anything I’ve done. »

Described by the artist as a “public intervention,” her performance was scheduled several hours ago (local time), just before PJ Harvey’s set, and is presented in collaboration with social arts collective CIRCA. “We are really facing a dark moment in human history. So what can be done? I always think protest begets more protest; hate begets more hate. I think it’s important to look inward. It’s easy to criticize everything else, but what can I do for myself, how can I change?”

Abramović is not naïve, however, and understands that taming a noisy crowd in a rightly noisy environment will be a huge task. “It’s a big risk, that’s why I’m terrified. I could fail completely, or people could just sit there. I don’t know, but I want to take the risk. Failure is also important, you learn from failure as much as you learn from success,” she said, adding: “I want to see how I can go beyond the acid, beyond the mushrooms, beyond everything that’s there and touch that moment in their soul and just for seven minutes stop everything. Can you imagine if we succeed? It will be an incredible moment.”