“Give unconditional love to each other”: artist Marina Abramović silences Glastonbury for seven minutes | Glastonbury 2024

It has hosted some of the UK’s loudest singing, most propulsive rap lyrics and most cacophonous guitar solos. But Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage experienced something almost unprecedented in its history on Friday: total silence.

Serbian artist Marina Abramović, invited by festival organisers Michael and Emily Eavis, led the audience in what she called a “collaboration” called Seven Minutes of Collective Silence, to “see how we can feel positive energy in the whole universe” and act as a bulwark against the horrors of war and violence.

Given that the announcement had only been made the day before, it was understandable that the audience would not be in the spirit of the collaboration and would end up chatting or even shouting during the planned silence. But in the end, apart from a few very isolated screams and screams, the only sound moving across the grass of the Pyramid stage was the wind blowing down the valley and the distant thud of the performances from the other stages.

“I thought it was wonderful,” said Lucinda, who was at the festival with her friend Lizzy. “I found out 30 seconds before it started. I adored him. This made my Glastonbury. I thought it was really powerful. Seven minutes passed very quickly.

Abramović wore a garment in the shape of the CND peace symbol, designed by former Burberry creative director Riccardo Tisci. (CND has a long-standing presence at the festival.) She introduced the piece with a speech in which she admitted to being “terrified and honored” by the Eavis’ invitation: “terrified because as an artist, I don’t I’ve never seen this type of audience in my entire life. I don’t sing, I don’t dance. She acknowledged that “it’s a music festival and you all want to have a good time and listen to good music.”

But she situated the collaboration in a career in visual and performance art that dates back to the early 1970s, saying: “In my 55-year career, I’ve always done something with energy – I don’t I have no better place than here at the moment than to make an intervention on energy itself. »

She added: “The world is in a really shitty situation. There are wars, hunger, protests, murders, violence. But what happens if you look at the bigger picture? Violence begets more violence, murders begets more murders, anger begets more anger, protests begets more protests. Here we are trying to do something different: how to be in the present, here and now, and how we can all together give unconditional love to each other.”

She invited the audience to put their hands on their neighbors, close their eyes and get comfortable, then invited Emily Eavis to ring a gong to begin the performance.

It eerily echoed the work of another Pyramid stage veteran: Beyoncé, whose “mute challenge” on her recent Renaissance tour saw entire stadiums of fans briefly go silent – ​​albeit for closer to seven seconds only seven minutes.

In an interview with the Guardian before the show, Abramović acknowledged that the show was likely to be a failure. “It’s a big risk, that’s why I’m terrified,” she said. “I could fail completely, or people could just sit there. I don’t know, but I’m willing to take the risk. Failure is important too, you learn from failure as much as you do from success.” She said she would visit Stonehenge on the way to the Somerset venue, to “get all the energy I can out of it” before the show, and would also attend other, louder events on the festival’s various stages. “I’ll be like a child with my eyes open,” she said. “Watching these amazing new bands that I know nothing about.”