On 15 November 2023, performance artist Marina Abramović addressed an audience at London’s Royal Geographical Society. She appeared in conversation with Tim Marlow, the Chief Executive and Director of the Design Museum, to mark the launch of her publication, Marina Abramović: Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places. Released through Prestel Publishing, the 416-page volume functions as a highly curated, material archive of the artist’s cognitive and logistical preparations spanning four decades. Abramović assembled this visual memoir exclusively on hotel stationery. The letterheads document her global trajectory, moving from impoverished early lodgings – where she noted the toilet paper cost more than the nightly rate – to luxury establishments in Tokyo, Moscow, and London. Within these pages, she preserved sketches, collages, poetry, and the preliminary notations for major performances. During the Royal Geographical Society event, the artist succinctly summarised the correlation between this transient documentation and her physical practice: “My home was everywhere I went because my home was my own body.”
This assertion of corporeal presence carried specific, immediate weight following her severe health crisis earlier in the year. In May 2023, following a routine knee operation, the 76-year-old artist suffered a near-fatal pulmonary embolism. The resulting medical emergency confined her to an intensive care unit for six weeks. During this period, Abramović underwent three life-saving surgeries, required mechanical ventilation, and received multiple blood transfusions. The severity of the crisis forced her to cancel international engagements, including a scheduled trip to Copenhagen to accept the prestigious Sonning Prize. However, Abramović approached her recovery through the same methodologies that define her art. She publicly confirmed that she declined opioid medication during her convalescence. Instead, she relied entirely on willpower and the extreme physical endurance techniques she cultivated throughout her 50-year career to manage her postoperative pain.
This brush with mortality precipitated a structural recalibration of her practice. During her conversation with Marlow, Abramović addressed her gradual withdrawal from performing her own exhibition pieces. She explained that she now increasingly entrusts the execution of her durational works to trained students of the Marina Abramović Institute, aligning with broader shifts in how live art is sustained, as seen among 5 Contemporary British Artists Redefining the Art World. She argued that her direct physical presence in gallery spaces has become “more disruptive than conducive.” This disruption, she noted, is largely driven by contemporary audiences prioritising smartphone recordings over the unmediated, energetic exchange that originally defined her work, a digital barrier that frequently challenges immersive installations like Yayoi Kusama: You, Me and the Balloons – A Psychedelic Pop-Art Garden of Earthly Delights.
The roots of Abramović’s extreme physical discipline and her complex relationship with authority were central themes in both the book and the London discussion. Born in Belgrade in 1946 to Yugoslav Partisan parents who fought under Marshal Josip Broz Tito, her early life was characterised by militaristic discipline, enforced primarily by her mother, Danica. The artist recounted her definitive flight from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia at the age of 29. Unable to locate her daughter, Danica filed a missing persons report with the local Yugoslav police. The audience at the Royal Geographical Society responded with laughter when Abramović relayed the authorities’ bureaucratic dismissal of the case: upon discovering the “missing girl” was nearly 30 years old, the police informed her mother that they had more important matters to attend to.
The geopolitical landscape of Yugoslavia shaped Abramović as fundamentally as her familial environment. She discussed the psychological impact of Marshal Tito’s death in May 1980, a moment she recognised immediately as a definitive historical rupture. She preserved the newspaper clipping announcing his passing, treating it as a foundational artifact of an era’s end. She offered a blunt, transactional summary of Tito’s non-aligned diplomatic strategy, noting: “He went to the USSR – got paid. Went to China – got paid. Went to the USA – got paid. And we Yugoslavians had everything and never had to work!” This perception of an artificial, state-subsidised reality contrasted sharply with the rigorous physical labour she would later demand of herself in her performance pieces.
One of the most persistent biographical threads traced in Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places is Abramović’s lifelong identification with the Greek-American soprano Maria Callas. This fixation originated in her grandmother’s kitchen in Belgrade, where she first heard Callas’s voice broadcast over a radio during breakfast. Abramović subsequently discovered profound biographical parallels between herself and the opera singer; most notably, both women suffered under the tyranny of intensely domineering mothers. This shared psychological architecture – echoing themes of processing deep-seated emotional pain, as explored in Avery Singer and the Art of a Shared Trauma – eventually culminated in Abramović’s major theatrical project, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. The opera, which held its world premiere on 1 September 2020 at the Bayerische Staatsoper (Bavarian State Opera) in Munich, systematically dissects the staging of mortality by recreating seven iconic death scenes from Callas’s repertoire.
The conceptual genesis of the 7 Deaths project, however, did not occur within the confines of a European theatre. As documented in her archival notes, the idea was seeded nearly three decades earlier in the Amazon basin. In 1991, supported by funding from Enrico Navarra, Abramović travelled to the infamous Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil. The massive open-pit mine, defined by its chaotic, treacherous working conditions, had already been documented globally by the Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado. Abramović’s original intention was to film a video project at the site, juxtaposing highly stylised, operatic deaths against the lethal, grinding reality of the miners’ daily existence.
Financial limitations, combined with the overwhelming physical reality of the Serra Pelada environment, ultimately forced Abramović to abandon the planned video juxtaposition. However, the expedition fundamentally altered her artistic trajectory. Her immersion in the Brazilian landscape shifted her focus toward the energetic and resonant properties of minerals. This pivot directly informed the creation of her “Transitory Objects” – a series of interactive sculptures utilising quartz, amethyst, and other minerals designed to connect the human body with the earth’s natural energy. Meanwhile, the conceptual framework of operatic mortality she developed in the mine incubated for another 29 years before materialising on the stage in Munich. Her broader connection to the country later culminated in the 2016 documentary The Space in Between: Marina Abramović and Brazil, which chronicled her journey to meet local shamans and healers.
Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places serves as the material ledger uniting these disparate geographical and temporal nodes. By meticulously preserving hotel letterheads from her travels, Abramović anchored her transient existence to specific physical locations. The Royal Geographical Society – an institution historically dedicated to the empirical mapping of physical terrain – provided an acutely appropriate venue for examining an artist’s internal mapping process. Her archival impulse demonstrates that her seemingly spontaneous or ephemeral performances are, in fact, grounded in decades of rigorous, material planning. The stationery fragments trace the alchemy of her career, proving how a vocal broadcast heard in a Yugoslav kitchen or a 1991 expedition to a Brazilian mine can be synthesised, preserved on hotel paper, and eventually transformed into monumental statements on physical endurance and human mortality.
