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From rock to reverie: Abramović tries to keep noisy Glastonbury crowd silent for seven minutes
The Guardian
|June 28, 2024
Glastonbury's Pyramid stage has played host to some of the loudest rock bands in the world and mass singalongs with thousands of participants, but today the artist Marina Abramović will step out and ask the crowd to do something different: remain silent for seven minutes.
"I am terrified," said Abramović, whose performance pieces have made her one of the most famous artists in the world.
"I don't know any visual artists who have done something like this in front of 175,000 to 200,000 people. The largest audience I ever had was 6,000 people in a stadium and I was thinking 'wow', but this is really beyond anything I've done."
Abramović, who is calling the event a "public intervention" rather than a performance, will address the crowd from the Pyramid stage at 5.55pm, just before PJ Harvey's set, and then ask the crowd to be quiet as part of a piece she is calling Seven Minutes of Collective Silence.
The Serbian artist recognised that asking thousands of festivalgoers, some who will have been onsite for two days, to keep stumm may be difficult but she hoped they would take the moment to reflect on the state of the world.
This story is from the June 28, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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