Sitting face to face with Marina Abramovic with a table in between is the closest thing to experiencing The Artist is Present, the famous piece with which ten years ago he revolutionized the art scene at MoMA, inviting people to sit down and simply hold him. the look… As soon as the guest lowered it, his time was up. There were those who lasted hours in this dialogue without words. And who came out transformed, having experienced the power of this artist born in Yugoslavia, one of the most influential of this and the past century, who is capable of being the canvas in which the other is reflected and glimpses the depths of his being: that heavenly, that demonic…
But in the meeting with La Vanguardia Marina Abramovic goes, logically, to the point. “Come on, let’s start, we have work,” she says in one of the rooms of the Gran Teatre del Liceu where she has broken into, causing a great stir inside the house and among the displaced media. She presents hers ‘7 deaths of Maria Callas’. An opera? A lyrical recital? A performance? A video creation? It is all of this in its proper measure and comes to break the boundaries of a genre that is still present in the piece: seven tragic arias from the repertoire in which the respective heroines die in different ways, and which serve as emotional resonances of their own life in parallel with those of Callas: two heroines unlucky in love who seek to exorcise their fatalities on stage.
Abramovic contains a work of more than five decades in which she is not only the subject but also the object of her work, and the work itself. “And she has not rested looking for her physical and emotional limits, something that she, as the mother of performance, has conceptualized as one of the highest forms of art,” says the artistic director of the Liceu, Víctor Garcia de Gomar.
A few cups of coffee in between make the scene inconsequential… perhaps it was not the best time to recover the pre-pandemic ‘Café de Artista’ format with which this newspaper approaches unique cultural personalities. Marina is… and she exudes a sense of humor.
Decades ago he made his Seven easy pieces and now he addresses that resonance of Callas through seven deaths. Why is 7 so important in her work?
Numerology has kept me very busy for a long, long time. There are three types of numerology. There is a Pythagorean, another Sanskrit and one from Kabbalah. And I studied Sanskrit with an Indian philosopher. Seven is a very important number. And in my numerology, if you count my birthday, November 13, 1946, that makes seven in all. So I use this number seven in many ways. I did the piece called 7 Easy Pieces. Now I did the 7 Deaths of Maria Calaes. Seven seems like the right number to me. Also, you know that in the Bible, God made the world in seven days. And all the cells in our body change every seven days. And every seven years you have to change your life. Seven is a present in the history of humanity.
Changing your life… does one have to actively do it every seven years to complete this cycle or is it just a self-expressing cycle of change?
It’s a cycle. He represents himself and you know you have to do something about it. I really believe that every time I live in a place for seven years, I have to change, or at least I have to change the furniture in the place, or I have to do something so that the order is different. I think it’s very important. It’s like starting over from scratch.
He decided that this opera/performance would include seven deaths. You die there seven times. Do you want to share some of that experience of dying so fast and so often?
Of course, I die in the opera, and the story is an opera story, not my own stories. But the idea was that it’s all because of love. And for me, love is something very important and emotional in human life. And there are two types of love, conditional love and unconditional love. And conditional love is so difficult… Unconditional is simple: love for human beings through the universe itself. But conditional love is so painful. In a way, I really experienced the one breakup that almost killed me, it completely broke my heart. And then I thought… if I die seven times in the opera, I’ll probably get used to it and it’ll be easier. So I’m let’s say cured.
Would you like to give María Calles another chance to die in a way other than for love?
Yes, but die at the culmination of the race, not at sunset. But she gave herself a lot emotionally when she died on stage because she was also a great actress. But to stop having that voice was the final death of her. And the one responsible for losing it was her: she lost weight out of vanity, not because it was good for her singing. And she made many other sacrifices that had nothing to do with caring and appreciating the gift that she had.
He was very angry when he saw the documentary Callas by Callas when he heard her saying that what she would have wanted was to be a housewife and mother…
Phew, I couldn’t deal with that at all. I’ve been married, but I’m not at all marriage material. I think that if you are an artist, you have to say that you have absolute freedom, that you can do whatever you want. You cannot be restricted by anything. So she really had a very bourgeois mentality probably from the time that she was living. We are talking about the 50s, 60s, 70s.
Was it a disappointment for you?
Yes, but I still adore her. It does not matter. You may be disappointed in your friends, but you love them. You only want the best for them, even though she gave up.
Does this disappointment affect the way you conceive this work?
No, it has nothing to do with disappointment. In this piece, you really see the melancholy and the sadness and the strength and the charisma and everything. And you see that whatever he did with his life, his voice became immortal and that is a fact, it is absolutely Immortal.
In ‘The artist is present’ you became a surface in which the other can be reflected. Does it work like that in this theatrical performance?
Yes, because, for example, ‘The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic’, with Bob Wilson, when I staged it, I staged my life. And it was very difficult, there were very painful things. I remember during rehearsals, I was crying all the time. And Bob Wilson said, “What the fuck is this? Why are you crying? It’s the audience that has to cry, not you.” And it was true. In the end, the biography, whatever you present, has to have a certain universality so that everyone can project their own life into what you see. And this was emotionally moving, for everyone to find a little bit of themselves.
Bob Wilson asking you to get out of his story?
That it came from poor Marina, from the diva Marina. “Stop this nonsense, get over it.” And I got over it. And I remember that a famous psychoanalyst from New York came to my dressing room and she said to me: You know what? What you just did on stage saved you 25 years of therapy, because you just put it all there.
What is it like to decide to work with one’s own biography?
I work with my own biography in what is mine because it is what I know. I always believe that the deeper you go into yourself, the more universal you come out to the other side. That’s because it’s very real and that touches the audience.
Use your body, your being… Is that body reached through singing?
When I talk about the pyramid of art, I always put music at the top because it is much more immaterial. And it’s the most powerful tool because it doesn’t need an object, it doesn’t need anything. Sound and music are absolutely at the top of any art, then comes performance and whatever else. But this is for me the pyramid, the music.
Can you tell us how you ended that youthful idea that theater is useless because it is not true but something false that as a performer you cannot embrace?
Yes, but now everything has changed. It’s very interesting: when you grow up, there’s a wisdom that you can’t have when you’re young. And when you’re young, you have to hate everything. You have to hate your family in order to grow. And that’s why I had to hate everything that wasn’t performance. But now I have more than 55 years doing performance. I feel very comfortable in that area, so I don’t need to prove anything. I can easily accept other art forms and enjoy them because they are no longer enemies. I don’t need to be against anything because I have established something that I feel very comfortable with. So I seek to do something that I am not. I want to explore other possibilities. And it’s very interesting because otherwise you run the risk of repeating yourself. And I don’t like to repeat myself. I like to always do something I know nothing about and that way you can also fail. I mean, this opera could have been a huge flop for me, but it wasn’t. Although I was mentally prepared in case it was.
You were looking for different ways to die… Did the operatic repertoire meet your expectations or was there a way you were missing?
No, I was just looking for operatic stories. He did not go beyond the history of the opera. Because, let’s see… in 90% of cases people die for love at the opera. That is why it has moved so many people. I only wanted it to be different ways of dying, so as not to repeat it. So he dies of stabbing, strangulation, tuberculosis, madness, burning in the fire… and things like that. When I did Madama Butterfly, I didn’t actually do harakiri because it’s so old-fashioned. So I put the radiation, that you die from radiation. I put some new elements into this way of dying.
So why do you think opera always needs redemption through the life of a woman?
Because it is the most touching, because it looks so beautiful. The dying woman looks better than the dying man in the scene. I’m sorry but it is true. There is something of the energy and the drama and the tears in her eyes and the pale skin and the trembling in her body and her beautiful clothes… It is very interesting the fact that dying in the opera is much more moving than dying in life real. If you see someone die on TV, you change immediately because you can’t face reality. But death on stage is always moving.
His love for Maria Callas began at the age of 14, when she was raised by her grandmother and listening to her on the radio.
It was something I will never forget. We used to have a very old bakelite radio, a big one in the kitchen. My grandmother would always hear whatever she was on the radio, she was always there somehow. I remember that she was having breakfast and a voice came to me, I got up and began to cry. My mother and grandmother said: “What happened?” “Nothing happened, just that voice came in.” Then the radio host said, “This was Maria Calles.” I wrote down her name and wanted to know everything about her. Now, here we are all these years later, and I know more than I did when she was 14 years old.
At the age of 14, did you dream of leaving your country or did you feel that everything you needed was there?
No, I always think that it must have been by mistake that Yugoslavia was born and I had to go out to see the world. Which I did. As soon as I could, I left. But I was 29 years old already, actually, I ran away from home and never came back, actually. Just sometimes. This is how my world and my studio became the planet.
