Ulay

Documents four of Abramovic's solo works, exercises in which her body is the vehicle for a rigorous testing of the self — violently brushing her hair and her face, vocalizing until she can no longer breathe, intoning a stream-of-consciousness flow of memories, moving to a drumbeat until she literally drops from exhaustion.

Marina Abramović Freeing the Body was performed at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, where Abramović began dancing frantically to the sounds of a bongo player. During the early part of the performance, she still has plenty of energy, and she rocks her hips and upper body vigorously to and fro. Over the course of the six hours, exhaustion sets in. Abramović falls back on a single monotonous movement, now and then visibly exerting herself in an attempt to reivigorate her body. After a final convulsive movement, in which she tries to give her all for one last time, she allows herself to collapse onto the floor and remains lying there, completely exhausted. During the performance, Abramović's head was covered by a black scarf. In this way, the audience was not distracted by Abramović as a person or personality, and attention can be focused on the body, which, due to its anonymity, has become an abstraction.

El camino entre dos puntos (The way between two points) investigates Patagonia’s tainted nature. Here, where throughout the 20th century ever enhanced methods of oil recovery, have transformed an amorphous, ambivalent and hardly populated landscape into an uncanny site of man’s supposed mastery of nature, the film traces the ways of a man, who wanders the scenes aimlessly, bound by his own implication in the menacing mechanics of oil production but drawn physically to their coevally proceeding erasure by the rough and untamed nature of this seemingly self-subsisting land.

Television special of five episodes directed by Alfredo Di Laura dedicated to the exhibition "Attivo. Performance e Dibattiti" curated by Tommaso Trini.

“Before the eyes of all, at least of those present, the naked and direct exhibitions of the body take place with all its extensions; but the naked eye of the spectators who circle is promptly doubled by the many mechanical or electronic eyes of the photographic equipment and of the 'cameras' which, with their clicks and their tenacious buzzing, form the background” Renato Barilli

In the twilight years of the Cultural Revolution, a Chinese filmmaker slowly becoming blind tours the country screening her last film to peasants. In it, the woman imagines two "alien" lovers walking from end-to-end along the Great Wall to join each other in the middle, one last time. This documentary is an adaptation of Ulay and Marina Abramovic's final collaborative project, the 1988 performance "The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk."

Documentation of the 2-hour performance by Marina Abramović and Ulay, performed in 1978 at Harlekin Art in Wiesbaden. In this piece, the two artists and a live snake triangulate the performance space. By blowing across the mouths of empty bottles, Abramović and Ulay produce sounds meant to rouse the snake, attempting to charm it and alter the physical geometry of the arrangement.

Marina Abramovic's performance 'Relation in time', with her long time partner Ulay. "We are sitting back to back, tied together by our hair, without any movement for 16 hours. Then the audience came in. We continued sitting for one hour."