1991

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ “DEPARTURE”

The world is now too dangerous for anything less than utopia.
Richard Buckminster Fuller

Body-movement is the relationship that characterises Marina Abramović's artistic practice during the 1970s, when, through active body art performances, she opposes her physical energy to another energy or force in the space. The body emits energy from itself... 
With static, meditative performances during the 1980s, the relationship changes, creating a body-time relationship, through which energy is directed inwards...
The 1980s conclude with the final joint project with Ulay, ‘Great Wall Walk’ (30 April - 27 June 1988). After the experience of the Great Wall, for the first time within her work, she establishes that cosmic connection which could be metaphorically called “earth-tree”; that is to say, in this case, through the body as a vertical axis, the interaction of the energies of the earth and the universe is established... 

She begins the final decade of this century with a Brazilian project, which will be presented in three stages: an exhibition at the Enrico Navarra gallery in Paris (2 October - 29 November 1991), then in Grenoble during 1992, and a final exhibition in 1993, which will bring together and present all the works created during the preceding period. 

The project begins with Marina Abramović's multi-month stays in Brazil, in amethyst mines, where the first of the series of works shown in Paris is created: objects for Departure, namely shoes for departure, helmets for departure, an inner sky for departure...
A departure on a transcendental journey... 
The sculptures are made from various materials: quartz, amethyst, iron, and copper, which the artist sees as the eyes, wisdom teeth, womb, blood, and nerves of the planet. The combination of these materials creates a specific effect on the user of the transitory objects.
In the process of creating the objects, the artist allowed herself to be guided by nature, by the found forms of crystals, and especially amethysts... From amethyst points she makes ‘shoes’, and from geodes, which in nature are pieces of rock whose interior is lined with amethyst and which contain water 35 trillion years old, she makes “helmets” and an ‘inner sky’. 
Purple, the colour of amethyst, is made from equal parts of the chthonic red and the celestial blue, colours that establish a balance between earth and sky, the senses and the spirit, love and wisdom... Its symbolism is close to that of the rock's outer colour, green, a colour equally distant from red and blue, which signifies the awakening of the primordial waters, the coming into being of life... 
The dual nature of colour and material is interesting, as is the structure of the crystal, one of the most beautiful examples of the union of opposites... solidity and fragility, materiality and transparency... as a transitional layer between the visible and the invisible... 
For many people from Australia to South America, crystal symbolises the fluid or radiant substance of another world, of other unknown human layers... it is considered to be shards of the sky or a heavenly throne... 

In her work, Marina Abramović brings the sky into the interior of the human microcosm... The body beneath the “inner sky”, in complete silence and unlimited time, with its eyes closed and motionless, is ready to embark on its journey.
A journey from the corporeal to the incorporeal, through the transmission of the earth's energy via the psyche as the inner world and the cosmos as the outer world, from the visible to the invisible reality; for reality, in all its forms, is not the only reality that exists. 

Marina Abramović states: ‘If we assume that the world is composed of countless parallel realities, and that each of these realities has a certain frequency, entering any one of them is only possible if we are on the same frequency. Transitory Objects are there to help establish that frequency.’

This concept of the observer now turns them into a participant, as it is the only way to gain a dual experience... to be inside something and to watch something from the outside... penetration and observation... a concave and convex feeling of the subject and of the object that observes and is observed, following the artist's instructions to put on a “helmet” or “shoes” to set off on a journey, depart...

In the next phase of the project, other transient objects will be realised in different materials (precious stones) to enable a meditative process and the perception of the invisible. The sculptures should broadcast a new transcendence for humanity through a crystalline structure that leads to the power of opening and knowing, of inner revelation, and of a harmony so desperately needed today.
For when light is guided into a circular motion, all the energies of heaven and earth, of light and darkness, crystallise... The circulation of light is the epoch of fire...

The exhibition review was published in the magazine Moment, Belgrade.