Marienbad

(the allusion to Alain Resnais’ L’année dernière à Marienbad is far from casual) is a large-scale installation/performance of the kind that has characterized the work of Marina Abramovic (born in Belgrade but living in Amsterdam since long) over the last ten years. Specifically designed for the disused Charcot Pavilion in the former psychiatric hospital of Volterra, it is given life by the atmosphere of an environment which is dense with unexpressed memories. Just think that when it was still functioning there were as many as 5000 patients in the hospital. Abramovic requests and solicits the participation of the audience, to whom she offers an experience where the artist is at one and the same time celebrant and sacrificial object, diva and clown, the instrument and the subject of passion, the object of desire and subject to a desire which suggests moves, poses, forms and figures. In what is present and in what is absent. The ritual here involves following a path through the building towards the point of the event: path and event are equivalent and only direct individual experience gives the work its form. Participation does not erase the difference in roles, but the notions of passivity and activity, essential components in the aesthetics of Western art, undergo that transformation necessary for the realization of the structure of desire and of passions. As in other of her works, there is a double shift that influences the quality of the experience: a change in gravity which causes a slowing of the pace, and a process of drawing from the past which has the flavour not so much of nostalgia as of the actualization of a landscape and an atmosphere belonging to an Italy disappeared a long time ago, just as the passions of those who lived in these very places in a state of reclusion determined by their illness and the way it used to be treated were forgotten and absorbed by time. What counts is duration, the persistence of the image over and beyond its consumption in time, the goodness and beauty of existence over and beyond the suffering of its inexorable passing.