Marina Abramovic: The material of my work is my anatomy. I do not have secrets

Marina Abramovic lacked to open his arms toward humanity gathered at the Itinerant Gallery Bernal Space of Madrid, and proclaim that art is a great collective performance that is done very alone. The physical priestess broke into the room with a red suit and closed from the neck to the ankles. The melena collected. Her challenging eyes with a coppery tone pointing light on her eyelids. Around it, a selection of 11 photographs with which she has built the new individual exhibition of her in Madrid - the last one was a decade ago -: Portrait is a Biography (the portrait as a biography), which will be open until next 19 March. And with the snapshots, she presents a movie of 2021, 7 deaths (1 hour and 50 minutes), where she recreates seven premature deaths of Maria Callas, one of the myths of the opera in the twentieth century and one of the sentimental totems of Abramovic

In this piece Maria Callas dies after each of the seven chosen arias. Seven moments where the tear is folded and that they come together, intimately, with the ramshackle life of the singer. "It's never a good time to die," says the artist, born in Belgrade in 1946.

- And his passion for the shutters?

- My relationship with her is very intense. He started an afternoon in my grandmother's kitchen. In the middle of a silence, her voice appeared on the radio. She was fascinating. I was 14 years old. The ecstasy was so unexpected that I got up and started crying ... At the end of that Aria the speaker said that she was Maria Callas. And I never got rid of her voice again.

Then what happens with some unexpected moments occurred: "Callas was my inspiration forever ... and the more I knew about his life, his damage, his pain, I felt a greater identification with her. It was sagittarius, like me; he had A horrible mother, like me. And somehow we share a physical similarity. What distinguishes us is survival: I have survived a broken heart and she died with the shattered heart ... is coherent, in most operas Heroine dies of love. Or on the contrary. "

And, otherwise, Marina Abramovic (Belgrade, 1946) finds another more common point. Something that is more in intuition than in the demonstrable: "When I act I have to be sure that a part of my brain is under control and the other free, I think something similar happened to her."

Last year, the Serbian performer received the Princess Sofia Prize of the Arts. «The life of an artist is not an easy task. She requires personal sacrifice, full dedication and commitment to her work, "she said then she. That commitment allowed him to not be defrayed when in the first decades of her work (she has been a reference for half a century), she had to endure the silence of criticism, the animosity of the galleries, the indifference of the museums. Until the revenge came to take a site: "When I started doing performance the artistic institutions were afraid of us, so I am used to this type of spaces [by Bernal space]. We acted for 10 or 20 people. If I had read The reviews When I started my work, it would not come out of a house. Everything was so terrible ... These art proposals were not acceptable. It was not easy. And I could never imagine that it was ever going to be part of the Museum, of the Mainstream " Explain. In the MoMA of New York she performed an action in which she interacted with the visitors of the museum who agreed to sit in front of her in silence. She titled The Art is Present (art is present). The Royal Academy of Arts is another Áuraian spaces of art since Abramovic has taken London by Assault.

If you suggest that the portrait is drawn is three words: "Soldier of art". And is that your place in the world has a lot of battle for which you chose a difficult trench: make your body be the object of a job that goes beyond anatomy to reach the site of all the challenges, of all lustiness . The purpose is to explore the possibilities of the limit from itself. "The material of my work is my anatomy, I do not have secrets, my biography can be the biography of any other person, because you can project your own suffering, your own problems in me, and then, if I can survive, you can also do it . Thus, I served as inspirational to youth. What's more, my generation does not exist for me2.

In 1973 he presented his first piece of Body Art, rhythm 10, where he was recorded with two cameras and 20 knives taping with each one between the spaces of the open fingers of his hand on a table. Every time he cut himself he left that knife and the action began with a new one. That work was a declaration of intentions. The ritual sacrifice of herself. Many years later she said: "There is still a good girl in me. When I do art I become very calm and completely normal."

- Is it a good time for Performance?

- I'm afraid not. In moments of economic crisis like the one that we cross the physical art cup the market against the decline of the other expressions. For example, what I do.

Marina Abramovic maintained a conversation with the art historian Carmen Huerta to present this exhibition in which he gathers 11 portraits between 1973 and 2019. From his image on a snowy road that he finally disappears, until his naked figure floating in "freedom" In Brazilian waters, to his neck carrying a living octopus or his arms holding a lamb in the middle of the mountains. "Everything they see is real, my pain is real, my suffering is real, my happiness is real, humor is real".

In 2012, the Marina Abramovic Institute (Mai) opened, an art center located in Hudson (New York) in which all kinds of cultural events, workshops and exhibitions related to performance and contemporary art are carried out.

He has something already myth in life, of legend concentrated in a reality underway where the search does not have as the purpose of the answer, but the will to continue opening questions with the body.