Present
Marina Abramović
Avatar Project in Rick Owens by TAEX & Filip Koludrović
TAEX and Collectible Dry present a special cover and an immersive fashion story accompanied by an interactive video for issue #30, featuring the avatar of Marina Abramović, the godmother of performance art.
Brought to life with the digitally recreated Rick Owens from the Concordians Fall/Winter 2025 collection, the avatar is styled in his signature aesthetic. Part of Marina Abramović Element, the artist's journey into the age of digital performance, this cover's avatar reimagines presence for the virtual gaze. Shot in the artis's hometown of Belgrade, Serbia, surrounded by monumental architecture, this fashion story that echoes both past and future, where performance and the art of fashion converge to reveal the vision of what's to come.
Creative direction: Filip Koludrović & Monica Pillosio
Photo: Filip Koludrović
Style: Monica Pillosio
Avatar: Marina Abramović & TAEX
Movement Direction: Marija Iva Gocic
Producer: Danilo Karapanza
Stylist Assistants: Raishind Singh Gill & Milana Saric
Photo Assistant: Darko Sretic
Light Assistant: Milos Kreckovic
IT IS PRESENT
A conversation between Théo Casciani and Marina Abramović
For Collectible Dry
Photography: Filip Koludrović
Photography: Filip Koludrović
Photography: Filip Koludrović
Photography: Filip Koludrović
Photography: Filip Koludrović
Photography: Filip Koludrović
Photography: Filip Koludrović
Marina Abramović. Have you ever heard of Gino De Dominicis?
Théo Casciani. Sure. You think I look like him, right?
MA. Has anyone ever told you that?
TC. Several times. Last year in Rome, while I was in residency at the Villa Medici, a guy even stopped me in the street and shouted "Gino!" as if he had seen a ghost.
MA. I knew him when he was young and you have the exact same face.
TC. Let's start this conversation with a disclaimer: I'm neither a journalist nor a critic, not even an art historian, just a novelist writing about connection, technology and feelings, and I suppose that's why I'm here to speak with you about this avatar. First, can you tell me more about the birth of your digital twin and how you chose to shape its identity, its features and its age, which is more or less the age of your career if I'm not mistaken?
MA. I never intended to create a young me, but rather to associate it with the period of my life that relates the most with wisdom. And this was when I was around 60 years old.
TC. I had a call with the TAEX crew you collaborated with, and I wanted to know how you felt during the process of generating this avatar, starting with the Shanghai project.
MA. We've been working on this for about three years, because at the beginning, I came with absolutely zero knowledge of technology. I come from the generation of Telegram and Xerox. At that time, we didn't even have computers. It took me a long time to start using it when those machines appeared, and I was still not that good at it. So when TAEX came to me, they had a lot to teach me to help me understand what were actually the terms that we had to deal with. Their great team allowed me to put my ideas into function and realization, through many meetings to explore all the potential backgrounds, actions and choices I could finally make. This is a very interesting company as it is made out of different people from different parts of the world. They all contributed so that I could comfortably create my vision, and that was essential for me: without them, I could never have done it on my own.
TC. Do you want this avatar to evolve in the coming years?
MA. The avatar doesn't age, but I do.
TC. But what if the avatar ages over time too?
MA. I don't know. Maybe it's too early to think about it. But I should put this in consideration: if the avatar is now 60, it can be 80 if I get to live until 100. Keeping that 20 years distance is a good idea. Thank you.
TC. As an author, I often wonder what will become of my characters when they are no longer mine. How do you feel about this double made up of every pixel and detail of your skin? What kind of relationship have you had with it since seeing this creature appear before your eyes? Love, empathy?
MA. It was kind of emotional for me because it was like seeing myself in the future. You know, our lives have a limit, and sooner or later, we're going to die. Thinking that once your physical body will not be there anymore the avatar will have its own existence, is pretty scary, but also truly great because whatever happens, this personification of myself will remain to share my experiences of performance and my way of making art with the younger generation of viewers, and everybody else. Even if it was a bit strange and hard to accept at first, the best I can do to get used to it is to try to be friendly with my avatar. The more this twin is going in my direction, the more I like it. Yes: I think we are friends now.
TC. There is a trend of robots trying to fit into our society as imposters, or scams. Do you want your avatar to pretend to be human, or do you want to keep a clear border between digital realms and the mundane world?
MA. The incredible progress of artificial intelligence, with its dangers and advantages depending on whether we use it against or for humanity, offers radically new perspectives. Recently, I had a conversation with a language model trained to be me, fed with any kind of interviews, diaries, thoughts and writings, everything I said and everything I did, and I was impressed to see that all these materials can be accessible and preserved anywhere and anytime. This device is also mindblowing because it overcomes the limits of memory, especially for when you get older. I'm very much happy to know that all my art can be encapsulated because I worked hard and I don't want it to be lost once I'm not there anymore.
TC. That's why I write: books can avoid the pressure of time and reach a kind of eternity.
MA. True, but the difference is that people need access to read books, while my avatar is available on the web at any point on the planet. Just by a click, without having to carry books around, without having to go to the library or to exhibitions, everything is here, wherever you want.
TC. Your project is crucial as it's using virtual systems to prove that reality matters more than ever. But if your avatar has a weight and a dimension, regardless of whether it is calculated differently than our bodies, I can't resist asking you what you think of its physicality. We have a dear friend in common, choreographer Damien Jalet, a longtime collaborator of mine who created a version of the Bolero with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and yourself. He often told me how important this is for you and your work.
MA. My work is immaterial, so the lack of physicality of this avatar is nothing but a plus in my opinion. It means that you no longer have or need a body, which has always been an obstacle to me. When we die, once the physicality is gone, the energy is still indestructible. That's what virtual worlds can convey.
TC. In fact, this twin allows you to elude the restrictions of the human body and to conduct "impossible performances", with snakes, scorpions and octopus over your head.
MA. Correct: the main idea is to break the physical limits. I can do whatever I want, like a child who dreams of flying high in the air, walking on fire or playing with knives. It gives a huge possibility of transformation as I can finally reinvent myself doing whatever I could not do for decades.
TC. I understand, but what are the constraints implied by such a digital creation?
MA. Look; it's very simple. All it takes is a change of energy in our solar system for the entire technology to suddenly break down. There is a basic danger inherent to electricity, as it can collapse at any moment and the avatar would disappear immediately. We consider those structures to be here forever, but it's actually interesting to realize how fragile they are. A storm on the Earth, an asteroid falling down or just a gust of wind in the countryside as where I am now, and our call would end. This vulnerability reminds us that we are small dots in the galactic immensity. And although we always tend to feel superior as humans, that kind of insecurity is precisely the core of performance art.
TC. Risk has often been your medium. In that sense, a way to give goosebumps could be to host the avatar on a single server for example.
MA. I don't know. I'm just thinking about durational pieces: when I perform something over months, there is a level of uncertainty that I use to connect with the public. But, in full transparency, thinking about this topic, the avatar didn't cross my mind yet.
TC. What about the project you created for this issue of Collectible Dry magazine?
MA. I gave as much freedom as possible to the team as I don't know how to do all this and my role was to look at their drafts, to define the direction we should go, to accept certain things, to refuse others, and to approve the final proposal for this series. I really like the idea of having brutalist architecture behind me, because I was born in ex-Yugoslavia, surrounded by abandoned buildings and unknown soldier's monuments. You can't really locate where it was taken, but it perfectly matches the innovative garments we had from Rick Owens.
TC. I love the way fiction can gather different levels of perception to impact the world and heal reality. But the border is thinner nowadays.
MA. As you come from Italy, we could say that this is like technological Arte Povera.
TC. I'm not Italian, but I don't mind becoming so in your eyes thanks to Gino.
MA. I really loved him. He was a friend and one of the most interesting artists of this period, extremely eccentric and very much gazing towards the future.
TC. Going back to the magazine, I was particularly moved by the cover and its digital version. We can see you walking slowly towards us, eye to eye, face to face. I am 29 and my generation is used to being exposed to a lot of digital content, but I feel that this one addresses our own responsibility.
MA. Your generation, the young generation, is so addicted to technology that it seems to be a second skin. Nowadays, the first thing we give to kids at school as a tool for their education is a computer. Attention span is minimal. It's even inconceivable to ask a teenager to sit and watch a TV program, except if they can have the remote control and click every single minute to switch to the next channel, then to the next channel, then to the next channel. Same with video-games: they are all extremely fast and you must react right away, otherwise you lose. My work is the opposite: it is about understanding who we are and why, it is about slowing down and being present. So I want to reach these kids and make them appreciate another rhythm and another attitude, to give everything I can to prompt them to slow down and to be present. That's the interaction I have with the world at the moment: using their media, but for a different purpose.
TC. What is the message you want to deliver in this cultural battleground?
MA. Everything is slow, slow, slow, slow, slow. And that's what I really love. I want people to slow down as much as possible, as slow as possible. This automatically brings you to a meditative state of mind, which actually my work is about.
TC. Are you a gamer? As soon as I discovered your digital project at the Venice Biennale in 2019, I started to see all your time-based pieces as video-games.
MA. The first time I was in Japan, in 1986, I went to a small place in the North where they had one jukebox with only one video-game you can play. The rule was very simple: you were a firefighter in front of a burning house full of babies, and you had to run through the flames to get out as many children as you could. The more you saved, the more you won. This was really amazing. I can't stop thinking about that image. It was just about doing something good.
TC. A few years ago, I was invited by Hans Ulrich Obrist to participate in a marathon-talk he organized at Centre Pompidou-Metz for the opening of his exhibition Worldbuilding. The assertion of this show was that video-games were the leading field of our era, just as cinema was in the 20th century and novels were in the 19th, which sounded both like good news for the nerd in me and bad news for the writer that I am. I love simulations, but they can sometimes preserve this common belief that dystopia belongs to the future while in fact it's already here with all the ongoing disasters. Do you see your avatar as a shelter or an escape?
MA. I'm kind of intruding into this speed world, but I want to bring it to a slow transition.
TC. If "The Artist Is Present" is the ambition, is the avatar a way to achieve it?
MA. Before I made this digital-twin project, there was a Canadian artist who created a really interesting video-game called "The Artist Is Present" that you can find online. It's very funny because I'm sitting at the table, the public is standing, you're a member of the audience and you have to wait real time to come and sit with me. It can take one, seven or fifteen hours, whatever. And if you are not behind your computer, you lose your spot and you are forced to wait again. I didn't invent it, but this is a genius game. Then I was thinking: okay, my avatar could do very similar stuff.
TC. So, "It Is Present"?
MA. Yes, exactly.
TC. I would like to talk with you about grief. First because I feel this project is also a way to transcend death and invent your afterlife. And also because my first experience of loss was the death of an avatar, a character from Final Fantasy that I was in love with.
MA. I don't see any connection between avatars and grief. It is just an image. It doesn't die. I just want my twin to be a teacher. A guide, an educator. It is here to show you how to open and close the door without leaving anywhere. I didn't make it emotional. This is a human thing: you can have feelings, it can't. At least, this one can't. It's like a Zen Master, never showing any passion, but showing you the way.
TC. Archive has always been at the heart of your work, so this avatar-guide perfectly fits in this tactic. What are the next steps you are imagining for this research?
MA. We are using it to create a display called The Abramović Method where it will teach you to do different things. And this publication in Collectible Dry is another way to show how the avatar can go in every direction, whether it's art, film, fashion, theater, performance. Even literature maybe?
TC. You told me you started this adventure as a noob, even though you had already explored these themes before, for example with your project at the Serpentine. How do you feel about this experimental journey?
MA. I'm really like a child. It's so interesting to explore all this potential. You know, at my age, no one does things like that. But I'm curious; I've always been curious.
TC. There is this desire to find the recipe for what will come next, but it often gets blurrier the deeper we go. For example, I remember this equation by J-G. Ballard who once said: "SEX + TECH = THE FUTURE". I think what is most inspiring about your project is the way you're avoiding both digital-hate and tech-beatitude by defending the idea of a collaborative agency with those entities, whether we see them as tools or beings.
MA. I could never imagine Gino De Dominicis would have been interested in such a thing, neither Mario Mertz by the way, but maybe Pistoletto could, talking about your Italian heritage.
TC. I love this story more and more.
MA. I hope to see you in Venice next year.
TC. Likewise, of course.
MA. Do you live in NY or in Rome?
TC. I am in the US at the moment, but I am based in Brussels, Belgium.
MA. How can you live without Italy?
Many thanks to Stefanie De Regel, Alexandra Anisimova, Sofya Chibis, Damien Jalet, Monica Pillosio, Alice Butterlin & Gabriel-René Franjou.