Marina Abramović has dedicated over fifty years of her career to redefining the boundaries of human experience, often through the profound application of stillness and silence maintained for long periods. “I think communication starts when words are not present at all. I think we put so much emphasis on language. Actually, silence is so much more important.”

On 28 June 2024, Glastonbury’s iconic Pyramid Stage became the unlikely setting for Abramović’s most extensive participatory work – an invitation for the audience to join her in Seven Minutes of Collective Silence. “I am terrified,” she admitted to The Guardian on the eve of her appearance. “I don’t know any visual artists who have done something like this in front of 175,000 to 200,000 people. The largest audience I ever had was 6,000 people in a stadium, and I was thinking, ‘Wow’, but this is really beyond anything I’ve done.”

At 17:55 BST, minutes before PJ Harvey’s set, Marina took the stage dressed in a custom silk robe by Riccardo Tisci, crafted by artisans in Milan to reveal the CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)peace symbol when the artist outstretched her arms. “The world is in a really shitty place,” she said to the thousands who gathered in front of the stage. “Here, what we try to do is something different: how to be in the present, here and now, and how we can actually all together, give unconditional love to each other.” After Emily Eavis sounded a gong, the field fell entirely silent. “The overall effect was strangely moving.” wrote Mark Savage, Music Correspondent for the BBC. “Setting aside the hedonism of festival life for seven minutes, thousands of people paused to contemplate their place in the world.”

As Abramović demonstrated, silence is not merely the absence of sound but a cultivation of internal stillness and presence. “There’s no such thing as silence,” said John Cage in 1952, recalling the première of 4’33 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York. “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third, people made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”  For Abramović, silence becomes a space for internal reflection, a pause in the constant bombardment of noise and information that defines modern life.

In succeeding to bring stillness to one of the loudest places on earth, Seven Minutes of Collective Silence marked a fundamental step in Abramović’s lifelong journey to ignite presence as a means for collective change. Responding to her achievement, Martin Griffiths, Former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, tweeted: “She can, and she did. Thank you, Marina, for the reminder that, across the world and with no cultural barriers, we all care enough to stop. And to think. As people in Sudan, Gaza, Haiti and elsewhere continue to face daily horrors, that’s the least we can do.”