Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

by Marina Abramović

She could have easily died there if my father hadn’t been such a lover of women. But when he saw her long hair sticking out from under the blanket, he simply had to lift it to take a look. And when he saw how beautiful she was, he carried her to safety in a nearby village, where the peasants nursed her back to health. Six months later, she was back on the front lines, helping to bring injured soldiers back to the hospital. There she instantly recognized one of the badly wounded as the man who had rescued her. My father was just lying there, bleeding to death—there was no blood available for transfusions. But my mother discovered that she had the same blood type, and gave him her blood and saved his life. Like a fairy tale. Then the war divided them once more. But they found each other again, and when the war was over, they married. I was born the following year—November 30, 1946.

His youngest brother had been captured by the Nazis and tortured to death. And my father’s guerilla squad captured the soldier who had killed his brother and brought him to my father. And my father didn’t shoot him. He said, “Nobody can bring my brother back to life,” and just let him go. He was a warrior, and had profound ethics about fighting the war.

Yves Klein quote: “My paintings are but the ashes of my art.”

Srebrenka lived down at the end of my street. One morning I was supposed to get together with her for coffee, but it was raining like hell all day, so I never went. And that rainy afternoon, she actually did it: she committed suicide. But—when we Slavs do things, we do them big!—she committed not just single but quadruple suicide: She turned on the gas in the oven, cut her wrists, took sleeping pills, and hanged herself.

Suddenly a man appeared and lit my cigarette for me. (I used to hold my cigarette with my thumb and forefinger, palm up: very sophisticated.) The guy sat next to me, and we started talking—just chitchat at first. I told him I was coming from London for a meeting in Belgrade. He said that he, too, was going to a meeting in Belgrade. Then he said a little more, and I realized he was on the arts commission that oversaw the job I was applying for. I suddenly had a flashback to my session with the Russian clairvoyant. Then he lit another cigarette for me. I said, “Thank you, Boris.” We hadn’t introduced ourselves—he instantly turned pale. “How do you know my name?” he asked. “I also know that you have had a terrible tragedy in your life,” I said. He started shaking. “Who are you?” he asked. “How do you know these things?”

A couple of months later, I created a more playful piece inside the lounge of the SKC: a continuous recorded loop playing the same airport announcement over and over: “Please, all passengers on airline JAT are requested to proceed immediately to Gate 265. [At the time, there were only three gates at the Belgrade Airport.] The plane is leaving for New York, Bangkok, Honolulu, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.” Everyone sitting in the lounge—whether they were drinking coffee, waiting to see a movie, or just reading a newspaper—became the passengers for this imaginary trip.

But when I asked him, “Why aren’t you coming with us?” he said, “I came from a little village to Belgrade—this was already a big step. You are going from Belgrade to Edinburgh, but I already made my Edinburgh by coming to Belgrade.” He never left, and he never really made it.

That thing that each of us lives with, that you are your own little self privately—once you step into the performance space, you are acting from a higher self, and it’s not you anymore. It’s not the you that you know. It’s something else. There on the gymnasium floor of Melville College in Edinburgh, Scotland, it was as if I had become, at the same time, a receiver and transmitter of huge, Tesla-like energy. The fear was gone, the pain was gone. I had become a Marina whom I didn’t know yet.

He took out his pocket diary and showed me that the page for November 30 was torn out. “I do that every year on my birthday,” Ulay said. I just stared at his little book. Because I hated my birthday so much, I would always rip that page out of my datebook. Now I took out my pocket diary and opened it. The same page was torn out. “Me too,” I said. Ulay stared back. That night we went back to his place, and we stayed in bed for the next ten days. Our intense sexual chemistry was only a beginning. The fact that we shared a birthday was more than coincidence. From the start, we breathed the same air; our hearts beat as one. We would finish each other’s sentences, each knowing exactly what the other had in mind, even in our sleep: we had conversations in dreams and half dreams, then woke up and continued them. If I hurt my finger on the left side, he would hurt his finger on the right side.

This is how I read the story: that to achieve a goal, you have to give everything until you have nothing left. And it will happen by itself. That’s really important. This is my motto for every performance. I give every single gram of energy, and then things either happen or they don’t. This is why I don’t care about criticism. I only care about criticism when I know I didn’t give 100 percent. But if I give everything—and then 10 percent more than everything—it doesn’t matter what they say.

Night fell; I went to her tent, which she had pitched right in front of the monastery. She was inside, naked, with only a little blanket to cover her. “How can you sleep like that?” I asked. She told me she had learned Tummo meditation from the Tibetans, a very special exercise that took four years to master. By visualizing a fireplace above your solar plexus, it’s possible to raise your body temperature to a point where you feel hot in the middle of the snow. To practice, Tibetan monks sit in the snow, naked, in the lotus position while students put wet towels on their shoulders. Whoever can dry his towels first wins. This woman from Chicago knew that technique. I was impressed.

What you’re doing is not important. What is really important is the state of mind from which you do it. Performance is all about state of mind. So in order to get to the right state of mind, you have to be mentally and physically prepared.

Building the abyss under the bridge is the task of the most advanced builders