The 2024 Glastonbury Festival could be plunged into silence later today (Picture: Rex/Getty)
Glastonbury Festival is known for its merry atmosphere of revelry, with music blasting out from multiple stages at once to entertain attendees – but one artist is hoping to completely change that.
At the 2024 event on Worthy Farm in Somerset, away from headliners Dua Lipa, SZA and Coldplay and the likes of Shania Twain, Cyndi Lauper and Avril Lavigne, Marina Abramović is hoping for silence.
And not just a few seconds of it, but seven minutes of full silence from Glastonbury’s iconic Pyramid Stage.
Yes, the same stage that has hosted the likes of David Bowie, Pulp, Sir Elton John and Bruce Springsteen, playing to crowds of tens of thousands, and anything up to the festival’s capacity of around 200,000, according to Abramović.
The Serbian artist, who is set to address Glastonbury from its main stage at 5:55pm on Friday – just ahead of PJ Harvey’s set – has admitted she is ‘terrified’ at the prospect.
Abramović, 77, is calling her slot/piece ‘Seven Minute of Collective Silence’ and sees it as a ‘public intervention’ rather than a performance as such.
A bold visual artist, Marina Abramović,is taking to the Pyramid Stage (Picture: Joe Newman)
She shares the same bill as headliner Dua Lipa, but will be looking for the opposite outcome (Picture: Getty)
It’s also, unsurprisingly, her largest-ever participatory work.
‘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,’ the world-famous visual artist told The Guardian.
She’s aware that it’s ‘big risk’, which is what scares her, asking what could be more than 210,000 festivalgoers at Glastonbury to stay silent – and for so long.
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The idea of Abramović’s stunt, which is being facilitated by arts organisation Circa who have previously taken over Piccadilly Circus’s billboards with artwork, is to get people to reflect on the current of the world, and what she calls ‘a really dark moment in human history’.
‘I could completely fail, or people could just sit. I don’t know, but I want to take the risk. Failing is also important, you learn from failing as well as succeeding,’ she added.
Abramović hopes to ‘go beyond the acid, beyond the mushrooms, beyond whatever is there and touch that moment in their soul and just for seven minutes stop everything’.
The world-famous visual artist admits to feeling ‘terrified’ about the stunt (Picture: Jack Hall/BFA.com/Shutterstock)
She hopes that the ‘incredible moment’ will come to pass, but also accepts it will be one of the biggest challenges of her career to ‘keep the energy of silence’.
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Source:: Metro
