Marina Abramović, longevity guru
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Pain is my speciality,” says Marina Abramović. “I have spent my career exposing myself to it in front of my audiences. I show them that if I can go through my pain, then they can go through theirs. I am their mirror.”
For the past five decades, Abramović, the 77-year-old artist, has given all her energy to her performances, investigating the limits of her mind and body to become what she describes as her “super self”. She has just been the subject of an acclaimed London exhibition (becoming the first female artist ever to be given a solo show in the 255-year-old Royal Academy’s main galleries). She recently performed her opera Seven Deaths of Maria Callas at the London Coliseum. But this month, she is launching another project entirely – The Marina Abramović Longevity Method, a website devoted to sharing her experiences of a range of culture-spanning wellness practices and her study of ancient texts. It sells the natural remedies – energy, immune and anti-allergy drops (£99), plus a Longevity face lotion (£199) – that she credits for keeping her so vital and alive.
I get to look into Abramović’s mirror one cold November morning while visiting her and her mentor Dr Nonna Brenner in the southern Austrian Alps. Sitting at a large wooden kitchen table, I face the woman who calls herself “the grandmother of performance art”. She looks phenomenal: porcelain skin, full lips, black hair, black brows, black eyeliner, black rollneck and black trousers. She recalls an eagle, albeit much friendlier; her dark eyes beam with intensity and warmth. Brenner, who was born in Kazakhstan, is a small, quietly observant woman, dressed in leggings, trainers and an oversized hoodie. Her severe bobbed hair and thick glasses recall Edna Mode in The Incredibles. Together they make a rather incredible pair. They serve mugs of herbal tea and a bowl of blueberries while we talk.
Brenner’s longevity centre is housed in a traditional 18th-century chalet half an hour from Salzburg. It looks over Lake Fuschl towards the mountains; its garden is garlanded with Tibetan prayer flags with a small outbuilding containing treatment rooms and a bijou but technologically impressive gym. As it also serves as Brenner’s home, the place is relatively simple: no one wears a uniform and she rarely allows more than four patients to stay at any one time.
It is in this modest farmhouse, strewn with family photos and filled with collected antiques, rustic furniture and comfortable sofas – along with a few random jars filled with leeches perched on a shelf near the kitchen – that Abramović comes for healing and restoration. “Right here is my safe place,” she says of Brenner, on whose shoulder she quietly rests her head.
It was Brenner whom she credits with curing her Lyme disease in 2017 after she contracted it at her home in upstate New York. “I was so ill, my energy was totally depleted and I had been to every hospital in the city, I had been given antibiotics but nothing was helping,” she recalls. “Finally I came to Nonna. She put her leeches on me as part of the cure. You cannot believe the poison that came out of me.” She claims she left the centre free of the disease.
Abramović is evangelical about the treatment she had with Brenner. “I’m not exaggerating, but when you have Lyme disease you have to make a decision: do you have the energy to brush your teeth or make a cup of tea? When Nonna put the leeches on me, which I had never seen used before, this kind of dark black jelly came out of my belly. Combined with building up my immune system, taking the drops and having five or six different kinds of energy treatments a day. It was like a real hospital here – not like so many of those wellness clinics I’ve been to where they tell me to chew on a piece of hard bread and yoghurt 36 times!”
Abramović and Brenner share an additional kinship. “We have such a strong bond,” Abramović continues. “Both of us are Eastern European. I was a communist but my grandmother was obsessed with the Russian Orthodox church and Nonna is Kazakhstani Orthodox. We both grew up with everyone always dressed in black because somebody had just died, but we also love to laugh and we share a love of drama and a strong connection with music, literature and poetry.”
Although Brenner and Abramović are close in spirit (and in age) there is something familiar, almost maternal about the connection between them – a connection that Abramović did not experience in her youth. Born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1946, she describes a “horrible” childhood. “My parents were both war heroes. They fought against the Nazis with the Yugoslav partisans, and after the war they became part of the privileged communist elite under Marshal Tito. I was abandoned,” she explains. “They were more interested in building the country than raising children.”
Abramović lived with her grandparents until she was six. She and her grandmother were very close. Her mother would later be obsessively strict with her, beating her “black and blue” for any tiny infringement. But she also loved art (she took the 14-year-old Abramović to the Venice Biennale) and encouraged her daughter to paint.
“My life was very restricted,” she remembers. “I had to be home every night by 10.30pm. I married young and my first husband [Neša Paripović] was never allowed to stay in my house.” It wasn’t until she met Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen), a fellow artist, in the mid-1970s in Amsterdam that she freed herself from the tyranny of her mother.
Today, Abramović credits her communist upbringing for her stoicism and self-discipline. She has made a career of the relationship between art, psychology and pain. In 1974 her controversial piece Rhythm 0 saw her declare herself an object, inviting an audience to use any of 72 props including knives, ropes, a scalpel, a gun, feathers and a bullet on her body – a six-hour endurance project that took on the violence of a mob. Much of the work that she produced with her lover and collaborator Ulay was highly physical and often violent: their first performance, Relation In Space in 1976, saw them running and crashing into each other, naked, at a slowly increasing speed.
She and Ulay were involved for 12 years, although they stopped collaborating in 1988 and did not see each other for many years. When he died of cancer in 2020, she was preparing for the RA exhibition: a commemorative video about him is a touching feature of the show.
Abramović still has an enduring belief in the possibilities of unconditional love – and the strength of friendship. Designer Roksanda Ilinčić first met Abramović at her show at the Serpentine Gallery in 2014. “The audience were all asked to be silent and wear headphones, and she came straight towards me and gestured that I should take my headphones off. I told her in our language that I too am from Belgrade, and she said, ‘I just knew it the moment I saw you!’” Ilinčić recalls. “After that meeting, we became close. We talked and posed difficult, often uncomfortable questions about our society and government – and the most important ones, which are: what is life? What is love? And what is worth sacrificing for?”
The lead-up to the 2023 Royal Academy show was a challenging time for Abramović and one in which her relationship with Dr Brenner became crucial. In May, having gone into hospital for a knee operation, Abramović suffered a pulmonary embolism that nearly killed her. She whips her phone out and shows me a photograph of a string of alarmingly large blood clots that had made their way up to her lungs before being removed. Having survived a coma, three operations, nine blood transfusions and six weeks in intensive care, she weaned herself off opioids and spent months regaining movement with physiotherapy. She then sent for Brenner, who went to care for her. Today, Abramović makes a pilgrimage to stay with Brenner for at least 10 days a couple of times a year. “She gets very cross if I only come for a week!” she laughs.
Abramović is full of fun wisdom when it comes to wellness, and not all of it of the eastern spiritual variety. “If you don’t feel good, it’s important to laugh,” she advises. “You must watch a lot of Chris Rock, I always feel great after I see him.” She also thinks it’s vital for women to try and have as much sex as possible when they hit the menopause. Her boyfriend of the past seven years is Todd Eckert, a former actor who produces content for mixed-reality devices. He’s 21 years her junior, and she positively shimmers when she shows me a picture of them together. He’s wearing a dapper black suit. “He loves fashion, like me,” she laughs, pointing out that it’s by Yohji Yamamoto – who made the first piece of designer fashion she ever owned. “I’ve never been happier.”
Brenner watches her friend with benign amusement. A medical doctor and psychiatrist by training, she works on an emotional and spiritual level, and her centre (she doesn’t like to call it a clinic) focuses on regeneration and healing using oriental, esoteric and traditional therapies while incorporating science and physiotherapy. Using Tibetan medicine, her way of working is intuitive and holistic – she works with the body’s vibrations: “Our whole life is about vibrations, and this is what I look at when I diagnose.”
While I eat one of the best pumpkin soups I’ve ever tasted, Brenner and Abramović show me the drops they have conceived as the linchpin of their longevity plan. The immune drops, which pack a powerful punch (believe me, I’ve been using them), contain fresh garlic bulb for its antiviral and antibacterial properties, along with chilli-pepper powder, lemons and shilajit, a resinous substance found in the mountains across Asia, which is believed to promote vitality and strength. The anti-allergy drops contain liquorice root, which is rich in antioxidants and is used to combat allergic responses. And the energy drops, designed to provide a sense of inner power, contain cranberry juice, succinic acid that gives energy to cells, and grape-seed flour, which is purported to improve circulation and cardiovascular health. The facial lotion has a fresh, lemony zing and contains hydrating botanicals, essential oils, vitamin C and hyaluronic acid, along with enzymes created by fermenting white bread and white wine.
The recipes, passed down to Brenner from her teacher, the Tibetan monk Dr Lu Shen, and used and refined over centuries, are tested and produced in a manufacturing facility in Switzerland. The packaging, bearing both her and Abramović’s fingerprints, was designed by the artist. “I don’t claim to have invented these products,” Abramović says, “but I do claim to live by them. They have been life-changing for me and so I am deeply passionate about wishing to get them out to the world.”
The relationship between these two Eastern European women is profound. They have both lived extraordinary lives, both absolutely true to themselves. Longevity and living with the twin pillars of age and wisdom feels nothing like a vanity project – and everything about feeling utterly yourself. “With age comes the gift of wisdom,” says Abramović. “And that wisdom is so precious because you start seeing life in a true light. There is lots of joy in this.” In a world that feels so far from where we are meant to be, this simplicity embraced by the two friends feels like the ultimate luxury. “And besides,” she pronounces, “my grandmother lived until she was 103. I fully intend to do the same.”
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