Performance Lessons with Marina Abramović

Lottie Consalvo is an acclaimed painter and performance artist who participated in Project 30, Marina Abramović: In Residence in 2015. Lottie was invited to live on-site at Pier 2/3 for the duration of the project along with 11 other resident Australian performance artists.

The residency took place upstairs from the project space, with the artists sleeping in curtained “pods“ that were used as living spaces and areas for performance development during the day. The public were free to spend time upstairs, watching the artists work or asking them questions.

Each morning the residency artists would attend programs led by guest artists such as Jill Orr and Mike Parr. Marina Abramović worked closely with the artists throughout the residency.

Lottie recalls Abramović urging the artists to experiment and play:

We make performance art, we use our bodies, so we should be using our bodies to derive performance from it.

"Put your computers away, put your pens down and do something. Move. Use your body. Come up with something. See what happens."

[It] was an approach that I got a lot out of. I feel that over the years I move more and more towards that, about what can happen just from experimenting with the body.

Lottie went downstairs each day of the residency to participate in the exercises devised by Abramović. These exercises included looking attentively at colours, making sustained eye contact with another visitor, being tucked into a bed or slow walking. As Lottie recalls:

The slow walking. Oh, my gosh. Just visually I could have sat there all day and watched the slow walking, watched people do it. But then to engage in the slow walking in a group of people was amazing.

It was nice just observing, as someone who makes performance, observing how works can transform in different spaces, different contexts.

On undertaking a residency with Marina Abramović, Lottie says:

I think maybe that has helped me in my practice, having met someone of her esteem, and how she deals with just getting through as an artist. I got to learn a lot about making performance and being more experimental with performance from her and then also how to navigate through the minefields that are there as an artist, they’re there all the time.

An artist that doesn’t allow themselves to do things and experiment can’t be making the best work that they possibly could.