Mambo a Marienbad Marina Abramovic, 2001

For the 6th edition of Arte all'Arte, curator Pier Luigi Tazzi invited Marina Abramović, who chose to create her work Mambo a Marienbad inside the former Neuropsychiatric Hospital of Volterra.

"Marienbad (the reference to the film L'année dernière à Marienbad by Alain Resnais is not accidental) is one of the major installations/performances that have characterized Marina Abramović's work for about a decade.

Designed specifically for the abandoned Charcot pavilion of the former Neuropsychiatric Hospital of Volterra, it lives off the atmosphere of the place, a place full of unspoken memories. Just think that when the hospital was active, it had up to 5,000 people present.

Abramović requires and encourages the participation of the audience, to whom the artist offers an experience, in which she simultaneously assumes the roles of celebrant and sacrificial object, diva and clown, through and as the subject of passion, the object of desire, and subject to the desire that suggests moves and attitude, forms and figures.

In presence and in absence. Here, the ritual involves a journey through the building towards the point of the event: the journey and the event are equivalent, and only the direct individual experience gives the work its form. Participation does not eliminate the difference in roles, but the terms of passivity and activity, essential components of Western aesthetics, undergo the necessary alteration for the realization of the structure of desire and passions.

As in other works of hers, a double shift is produced that affects the quality of the experience: in this case, it is a change in gravity, which causes a slowing of the pace, and a retrieval from a past that tastes not so much of nostalgia but of the actualization of a landscape and a climate that belong to a long-gone Italy, just as the passions of those who inhabited these places in the confinement imposed by illness and its treatment on the patients have been forgotten and devoured by time.

What matters is the duration, the persistence of the image beyond its own consumption within time, the goodness and beauty of existing beyond the suffering of their inevitable passing."

Pier Luigi Tazzi, “Arte all’Arte VI”, 2001

Interview by Jérôme Sans and Pier Luigi Tazzi

What is the meaning of Mambo a Marienbad?

I did several site visits in different areas of Volterra, but the places that seemed most interesting to me were two pavilions of the now-defunct psychiatric hospital, destined for slow decay. The first building I visited was enormous, with long corridors that immediately reminded me of Last Year at Marienbad. In the building, everything was symmetrical, and I recalled a line said by one of the characters in the film: "I walked in a straight line and got lost." This work is about memory and how much the audience will project their own stories onto it. The atmosphere of the place is strong, heavy, almost morbid. In this building, patients suffering from hysteria were treated with various methods that today seem like true tortures: electroshock, prolonged immersion in cold water, patients bound in straitjackets, there was even a patient who was tied up for twelve years, in complete isolation in a room without windows... Once admitted to this hospital, patients spent almost their entire lives there.

The patients used to write letters to their families, to their husbands, wives, children, lovers, the director of the hospital, and to God. All letters that never received replies because they were never sent. On the walls, along the corridors, scratched with their nails, there are phrases, messages, and poems. Today the building is abandoned. There are no more patients. But their presence is still alive. Mambo a Marienbad tries to bring the audience to empathize with those who inhabited this place. I built an iron guide along the entire length of the main corridor leading to a platform, also made of iron. Upon entering, the audience is asked to take off their shoes and wear "mambo shoes" with magnetic soles. These are the instructions: enter the corridor and slide along the iron guide without lifting your feet until you reach the iron platform. There, on the platform, I am dancing non-stop in a red dress, high-heeled dancing shoes with a magnetic sole, to the tune of Mambo Italiano. This cheerful music spreads throughout the building. My intention is to provoke a pure paradox in the audience. After the opening, the instructions for the audience are different: now it is up to the audience to step onto the platform and dance the mambo.

Is it a way of saying "now do it on your own"?

Slipping with magnets under the shoes is very difficult, it transforms the sense of gravity and especially causes a slowing of movement, thus increasing the time for perception, reflection, and for absorbing the emanations of the surrounding space. The audience is not a spectator. They are an active element, part of an experience. Sliding along the iron guide through the endless symmetry of the corridor, one can look to the right and left at the various rooms. These are mostly empty, dirty rooms, with rubble and dust on the floor that seems covered in snow. Then, in one of them, almost at the end, unexpectedly, there is a man sitting on a chair with an extremely tall cone-shaped hat on his head, shirtless, moving his lips as he silently reads a stack of unsent letters. There is no pause, it is just an apparition.

How do you connect this work with your previous performances?

First of all, the spirit of the times is different. The audience of the 1970s was the silent witness of the performance process. After thirty years of performative experience, I have come to the conclusion that the only deep change a person can experience happens through their personal experience. It’s not enough for artists to perform. Today is the time for the audience to drastically abandon the role of the silent witness and become an active participant.

I like to bring the principle of music into the performance. If you take a score by Bach, you can perform it today whenever and wherever you want. You can make an exact version or a sample, a techno version. We can see the performance as a score that the audience can use.

Furthermore, there is another method I like to use to relate to the audience: the contract. I proposed a contract to the audience in the work In Between: they had to give their word of honor to spend 40 minutes in the performance space without leaving; if they didn't sign the contract, they couldn’t enter. It’s a very simple exchange. I give them my work if they give me their time. This idea came to me from the frustration I feel when I see how the audience looks at the works. We live in a time where there is no time. Artists today make video installations where they will capture the viewer's attention at most for a minute, the time for a fleeting glance. As Paul Virilio says, "We are truly in a zapping culture." The purpose of the "mambo shoes" is another attempt to slow down the pace.

“Arte all’Arte VI”, 2001