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Marina Abramovic in Walsh Bay. Daily Telegraph photographer Bob Barker is taking her picture.

Marina Abramovic is in Sydney for the duration of her Kaldor Public Art Project, Marina Abramovic: In Residence. That means this city, until July 5, is playing host to one of the most famous artists in the world.

When I met Abramovic at Pier 2/3 in Walsh Bay on June 5 this year (2015), I found her to be personable, warm and only too pleased to enunciate her artistic methods and philosophies.

It was chilly, so we retreated to her lovely room overlooking Walsh Bay. Here is the interview:

I would like to concentrate on the John Kaldor project you are doing in Sydney. What will be your role?

First of all this project’s different than many other projects we’ve been doing in relation to the Abramovic Method because here we also have the artist in residence which I didn’t have before. So the project is separate two parts but they’re connected. The first part is really working with the public and I feel like I’m conductor, of energy basically. I give them the tools; they should interact with these tools, and to see how they can use any of this experience in their own daily life, and it doesn’t matter if they are teachers or politicians or they’re farmers or they’re any kind of profession you can imagine, because some of this experience can be used in any kind of profession you are in in your real life. And a part of this we have residency program which we ask the artists to participate in this Abramovic Method every single day for 12 days and they create this as a conditioning for their own work. So they see how that actually can help them for their concentration, for pushing their own physical and mental limits, for creating the different type of perception, the willpower and so on. So that’s the base. So we see two results. One work with the general public, and one work with someone who is really artist and creative person. So I’m kind of managing all these things. But in the same time I have two very important helpers. Sophie O’Brien who is Australian. She was curator at Serpentine and she curate my show 512 Hours. And I specifically invite her because she knew Australian scene much better than me. That we together look into the applications and choose the artists for the residency program. She will be one of the leading and curating the residency program. But I will interrupt with artists, I will talk daily with them and also give the opening speech. And then Lynsey Peisinger, who is right now auditioning facilitators and also training them to work, because if we have a few hundred people there, I can’t talk to every single person. We have to have facilitators who are trained properly who can actually lead this workshop to have the best success.

So the workshop have different parts. The first thing that happen is you have to leave your watches, your telephone, computers in the locker, so you get kind of free time for yourself. And then after that you are given headphones to block the sound completely. Now you are without technology and without hearing. You are just in silence. And then you start doing these exercises. And the different ways how you want to do, you are pretty free to manage. The one is slow motion walk, another one is rice counting, eye gazing, lying down and looking at the colours. So they’re all different exercises which I train myself through my career. And many others. But specifically these, because they are the more simple ones but also the most efficient that everybody can do in his own life. And to me,  idea is how to ritualise our daily existence, how to find the space of silence inside yourself, how you can deal with this, because we live in very disturbed time and there is no time for anything and the war is everywhere and we have to look for the different peace and awareness and the only way to change is to change consciousness.

How long did it take you to develop the exercises?

About 40 years! You know, I also believe the most simple things are the most efficient. But I went to so many different cultures because I always feel I am kind of bridge between East and West because I am born in Balkan and I always believe Balkan is kind of bridge between these two type of worlds,  and I understood what’s wrong in the west and I was looking for some answers from the east. People don’t understand much, especially here in Australia, how important for me was living almost one year here with Aborigines. This was essential for my work. I learn so many things about presence, here and now, about temporality of our life, about the connection to nature and so on. Right here in Australia my entire view on the world changed. So that was very important history. And coming back now is such nostalgia and I really have this all memory back how it was. Because the hidden nature is incredibly powerful. One thing is the city but just going to outback, going to place where you just see the earth, the sky, it’s just incredibly important.

Ian Howard facilitated you doing that trip to the desert.

Yes. Nick Waterlow who actually give us the letter that we have to bring to Phillip Toyne. Phillip Toyne was a lawyer in those days living in Alice Spring and he was busy with the Aborigine land rights and I remember going to Phillip Toyne and he say ‘what do you want, you want to be like another bloody tourist want to take advantage of the Aborigines? Get out of here.’ And he throw us out. And then he said to us, ‘if you want to do something for them, then let me know’. So he literally won’t to talk to us, and he was very, very angry. And then we left and then we asked for the grant of the Australia Council which we get the year after. And we get the grant, we got second hand Jeep, we went to Alice Spring and we say ‘Philip we are here, what we can do?’ And he was so surprised that we went back, and he say, ‘OK now we’re going to talk’. He was making the book on the land rights, and I could do photography and design the book, and all I could make them up, so territory, so we both help for like two months in Alice Spring doing this and after we done he say, ‘OK, now I give you permission, now you can go’, and this is how the beginning of this. It was really, really important. We invite Aborigine medicine man to come to Amsterdam and do performance with us which really happened. We had the two of them and then one. It was such important. We really established the friendship with them. Andrew Crocker was another man, he was the first one who brought canvas to the Pitjantjatjara, the tribe, and actually helped them start painting. I was right there. At the beginning of all the starting of the Aborigine artist doing things. So that period of my life was very important for later development of my work.

Did it give you a connection with nature?

Connection with nature but also Aborigine ceremony is the way of life; they actually live through ceremony and they don’t have physical possessions, they don’t care about possessions, they just live in the present. And that’s for us the base of performance art because performance art is immaterial form of art. You have to be there to experience physically. You can’t just, like a painting you put nail on the wall you hang the painting, next day it’s there. Performance is not. If you’re not there, you miss it. And then is immaterial form of art, because it’s something that you have to experience, you have to feel, you can’t touch it, you can’t have it, you can’t hold it. Aborigines are very similar.

Did you witness ceremonial events in the desert?

First of all, lots of interesting things happened. Oh God, I could write just a book about. Ulay was living with the men and I was living with the women because they were strictly always separated. With women I was doing lots of things with the dreams because they played their own dreams. There would be always older woman in the morning that come on the hill and with stick she would draw the dream and we all have to play her dream. And If there’s 10 women in the tribe we will not finish all day the dreams. So next morning there will be more dreams and more women from last night so there will be endless dream actually re-enacting which was so beautiful. And we had a certain early initiation, not a very high one, and this was like, it’s lots of very strange stories which you can’t even explain because they’re supernatural. It’s another world. But anyway it just influenced my life very much.

Who went out there to meet Phillip Toyne?

Ulay and me. Just two of us. With the letter of Nick Waterlow, which is so tragic what happened to him. I can’t believe this. I remember going with him, we went to the market and buy spices and cook the dinners and it was so wonderful. And another person I really want to see is Mike Parr which I love. Such important artist in my point of view. I love his work and he was an early performance artist and he was such a great, you know. And when we came to Australia in 1979 we slept at his house. I remember saying my God this is the end of the world. (laughs). Mike is lovely and his wife, all the family are really nice.

What is your hope for this project? That it will have an on-going effect?

You know, the thing is after I finish Artist is Present for me was very important, what is my legacy? When you came to a certain age, and I am next year 70, it’s like so much age, what you do? And I was not interested in creating a foundation. Like most of artists create a foundation to protect their own work. But my work is so immaterial, so I was thinking I would like an institute, something that really could help young artists with the residency programs to develop their work but also to archive the performance heritage. Because there’s so few performers. There is hardly anybody my age who’s still performing. So I really feel that preservation performance art. Because performance art when it’s really good performance can have an incredible transformative energy and that’s something that other art is not the same because this is living art and this is why it’s so hard to be mainstream art, it was always non mainstream, and only recently which I really hope I contribute to become mainstream, and is now in the museums and people can look seriously. It took me 40 years to actually come to the position that people can listen to me, because nobody was even thinking this could be take serious this form of art at all, it was more like entertainment. So I think the performance art is serious business. So I wanted to work in institute to deal with the idea of how we can see the future, how we can see connection with art, science, technology, and what is the future of art today, and what is the function of an artist today. Because this old fashioned way of the artist who be drunk and full of drugs and then create the work.  We have so much more duty to really contribute to society because our society as it is now is not good, we have to do something , and artists have to in their own way create work who can enlarge the consciousness, who can really see reality in different way. Ask the rights questions, and to reflect the future. The good art predict the future. This is why institute is just about all this, and my contribution is to create a method that can be like a base for the people to start reflecting on their own self. Simple things, like what is your function in being born on this planet. Just understand the temporality of our existence, which is so important because we always behave like we’re forever, but if you include the idea you can die any moment any life, then you understand that actually you have not much time, and you should not spend time with bullshit. Really focus. That’s the idea that performance can bring this kind of awareness.

Are you hoping that a lot of children come to your Sydney project? (It is open to people of 12 and over.)

You know what I am incredibly pleased that I am one of the few artists today in the world to have extremely young public. And somehow my public is not any more art public. It’s became mainstream public. After Artist Is Present something emotionally happen, that I start having the type of public who normally don’t go to museum but they come for this experience because this experience really talk to them. This kind of the method which I’m offering here, it would not be possible 10 or 15 years ago. It was not ready but now we are so lost, and we need now more than ever. And this is right time and I really want, for me the young people is the future, they’re the ones we have to address. My generation, it’s too late! The youngest that can be in this method is 12, so my public’s from 12 years old on. And when I give speeches I have this incredible young people come in. I just want to show you one image that really talks to you. (She shows me lots of images of young people, and of other ages, with their headphones on just lost in themselves with their eyes closed.) You have these images that really touch my heart, because I know it’s function, I know it’s working. We’re talking three generations (in the picture there are three people standing together holding hands and lost in reverie). They’re completely in themselves. This is something I am so proud that I can give them the tools that bring them to this point of concentration. This kid never had headphones without coming from them unbelievable loud music. You know, when I put headphones on this kid he said to me, ‘but doesn’t work’. I said, ‘exactly, doesn’t work. This is silence’. He never understood what means silence. It’s simple. I ask them to count the rice, I ask them to walk slowly. It’s the simplest you can imagine but we forgot simplicity. This is all about going back to simplicity, and the people all get there and they get there in different ways. I live for this; it means my purpose on this planet is worth it.

In your 1974 performance, Rhythm 0, you stood in a room and allowed the public to do whatever they wanted to you, with the aid of 72 objects on a table. The objects included a knife and a gun and a bullet. (Members of the public cut Abramovic and one loaded the gun and pointed it at her.) Why didn’t that put you off people forever?

It’s a really interesting thing, I’ve realised now because I’m much wiser than I was then, that I actually wanted to prove that performers, because we’d been so much criticised that we are masochists, and sadists, and performances are just voyeuristic, I was completely dressed, and I didn’t do anything , very calm, and the public was the possibility to be gentle to me and to be cruel, and they choose to be cruel, so it’s not me who is masochist and sadist, it’s the public. And I also understood that if you give the public tools to put the spirit down, they do. But if you give them tools to lift the spirit, they do something else. So in The Artist Is Present, I actually bring the best out of the public. And in Rhythm 0 I bring out the worst.

The potential for harm has reduced over the years in your performances. In the Kaldor project, it is gone.

I don’t need any more. I think it’s about bring the spirit up because it’s so much easier to bring spirit down.

 Elizabeth Fortescue, June 24, 2015