In my teens, before my father left us, I would often have lunch with him at the polytechnic institute, where he was a lecturer on war strategy and tactics. One day his lecture ran long, and I went to the amphitheater to wait for him to finish. I opened the door in the back of the auditorium, and as he saw me coming down the aisle, he said, “And this is my daughter.” When he said this, the entire amphitheater full of students—all of them boys—looked at me and started laughing like hell.

It was like a bad dream: I was so self-conscious in those days, so insecure about my looks. I turned bright red and ran away. And I never understood why this had happened.

Many years later, a friend of mine said, “I remember the first time I ever saw you. It was when I was taking your father’s course at the university, and you entered the amphitheater, and your father said, ‘This is my daughter’—that was when I saw you for the first time.” I said, “Okay, can you tell me why you all laughed?” He said, “Your father was talking about war wounds, and saying that sometimes they can look very light but have terrible consequences in life, and sometimes they can look disastrous but it’s okay, you can live with them. He said, ‘Take me, for instance. During the war, a grenade exploded near me and a fragment destroyed one of my balls. But you should see what kind of daughter I made.’ At that moment you walked in, and he said, ‘This is my daughter.’ ”

I never knew that my father had only one ball.

Besides my single suitcase I had next to nothing when I arrived in Amsterdam, just a few nearly worthless dinars I’d brought with me from Yugoslavia. Ulay, on the other hand, had a lot of baggage.

If my childhood had been materially comfortable but emotionally desolate, his early years had been even harder. He was born in Solingen in the middle of the war; soon afterward, as Hitler desperately mobilized thousands of older men and young boys, Ulay’s father, who was over fifty already, was drafted and sent to fight in the Nazi siege of Stalingrad. It would be a long time before he returned.

In the meantime, the Allies began to win the war on the western front, and the Russians threatened Germany from the east. In a panic, Ulay’s mother took her baby and fled toward what she thought was unoccupied Polish territory. But she wound up in a village full of Russian soldiers, where she was gang-raped. As this was happening, baby Ulay crawled away—and fell into a field latrine, a hole full of shit. A Russian, maybe even one of the soldiers who had raped his mother, spotted the partially submerged infant and pulled him out.

Ulay’s father returned after the German defeat, very sick. Before the war he’d had a cutlery factory, but an American bomb had destroyed it. After the war, Ulay’s parents struggled to make ends meet, and his father never really recovered from his illness: he died when Ulay was fourteen. Not long before his death, he advised his son never to join the army if he could help it.

Ulay took his father’s advice to heart. As a young man, he trained as an engineer, then married a German woman, with whom he had a son. But when his draft notice came, Ulay fled the country, leaving his wife and child behind, drifting to Amsterdam—where he impregnated yet another woman.

He told me most of this history; I would learn the rest gradually. And as crazy as I was about this man, as I breathed with his breathing and ached with his aches, underneath it all I felt a tiny seed of ambivalence. I felt I could never have children with Ulay because he always abandoned them. But somehow, at the same time, I believed our working relationship would last forever.

Ulay’s Amsterdam apartment was spare and modern, but filled with a certain amount of history. In New York a couple of years before, he’d met a gorgeous young Nicaraguan woman, a diplomat’s daughter named Bianca. He’d taken hundreds of pictures of her, and the Polaroids of the woman who later became Mick Jagger’s wife hung all over the apartment.

And then there was Paula.

She was a KLM stewardess; her husband was a pilot. They were separated from each other for long periods, and apparently enjoyed an open marriage. It later turned out that Paula had been paying the rent on Ulay’s nice modern flat in New Amsterdam; her name was on the lease. It also turned out that they’d had a very passionate relationship. Understandably enough, I guess, he never wanted to talk about her. I also think I didn’t want to know too much about her.

Apparently, though, he didn’t handle the break-up very well. When I arrived, two telegrams to Ulay were sitting on the kitchen counter. One was from me, from Belgrade: “I can’t wait until I see you,” it read. The other was from Paula: “I never want to see you again.”

Some couples buy pots and pans when they move in together. Ulay and I began planning how to make art together.

There were certain similarities to the work we’d done as individuals: solitude, pain, pushing limits. Ulay’s Polaroids of that period often showed him piercing his own flesh in various bloody ways. In one work, he tattooed one of his aphorisms on his arm: ULTIMA RATIO (meaning final argument or last resort, referring to force). Then he cut a square hunk of flesh containing the tattoo out of his arm, slicing so deeply that the muscle and tendon were visible. He framed and preserved the tattooed flesh in formaldehyde. For another image, he held a bloodstained paper towel over a self-inflicted razor wound in his belly. A series of shots showed him slicing his fingertips with a box cutter and painting the white tiles of a bathroom with his own blood. Then there was the little jeweled brooch, in the shape of an airplane, that he pinned to his bare chest. I realized later that this symbolized his longing for Paula. In the Polaroid, he posed with his head cocked like Jesus dying on the cross; a red trickle, like the blood from the spear wound in Christ’s side, ran from the airplane pin down Ulay’s flesh.

I had been invited to perform at the Venice Biennale that summer, and when I arrived in Amsterdam I told Ulay that I wanted him to perform with me. First, though, we had to figure out what to do.

We bought a big roll of white paper, unrolled it, and taped a ten-foot-long sheet onto the clean white wall of the apartment. On this mega notepad, we began jotting down ideas about the kind of performance we wanted to make: there were phrases, sketches, doodles. In the midst of this process, inspiration struck when somebody gave Ulay—of all things—a Newton’s cradle, the same item I’d worked on assembling at the factory in London. He was fascinated by the back-and-forth swinging of the shiny metal balls, the little clack they made when they collided, the perfect transfer of energy.

“What if we did that?” he said.

I immediately understood what he was talking about: a performance where the two of us would collide and bounce off each other. But obviously we weren’t made of metal, and there was no way a collision between us would be neat and crisp.

And that was a beautiful thing.

Ulay/Marina Abramović, Relation in Space (performance, 58 minutes), XXXVIII Biennale, Giudecca, Venice, 1976

We were naked, standing twenty meters apart. We were in a warehouse on the island of Giudecca, just across the lagoon from Venice. A couple hundred people were watching. Slowly at first, Ulay and I began to run toward each other. The first time, we just brushed past each other as we met; on each successive run, though, we moved faster and faster and made harder contact—until finally Ulay was crashing into me. Once or twice he knocked me over. We had placed microphones near the collision point, to pick up the sounds of flesh slapping flesh.

Part of the reason we were nude was to produce the simple sound of two naked bodies colliding. There was a music to this sound, a rhythm.

But there were other reasons, too. For one thing, we wanted to create a work that was as minimalist as possible, and nothing is more minimal than the nude body in an empty space. Our statement for the piece read, simply: “Two bodies repeatedly pass, touching each other. After gaining a higher speed, they collide.”

But for another thing, we were in love, we had an intense relationship—and the audience couldn’t help sensing this relationship. But of course there was also much they didn’t know about it, much that each audience member projected onto us as we continued to do this performance. Who were we? Why were we colliding? Was there hostility in the collision? Was there love, or mercy?

When it was over, we felt triumphant. (We also both hurt like hell from our bodily collisions.) We decided to take a few days off at my cottage in Grožnjan, which was just across the Gulf of Trieste from Venice. One morning we were in bed when I heard keys rattling in the front door downstairs. “Oh my God,” I said. “It’s Neša.”

My husband, now so distant from me, hadn’t seen me in months at this point. All he knew was that I was traveling for my art, to Amsterdam and Venice. And he had no idea of Ulay’s existence.

I threw on some clothes and went down to meet him. And then we went to a café and, after having been with my new love for eight months, I told my husband the truth.

We divorced. In a Communist country it was very simple: it was just a matter of going to the notary and signing two pieces of paper. There was nothing to share, no communal property. Not a spoon, not a fork—nothing.

Neša realized I had to go my way, and in order to go my way I had to leave the country. I simply could not be there anymore. And he understood.

It was our birthday, the day Ulay and I shared: November 30, 1976. I was turning thirty, he was turning thirty-three, and we decided to do a birthday performance for our twenty Amsterdam friends. We called the performance Talking About Similarity.

We had lived together for almost a year, and we had come to feel that in many ways we were the same person, thinking the same thoughts. Now it was time to test that hypothesis.

We held the performance in the studio of a friend, the photographer Jaap de Graaf. We set up chairs, like in a classroom; Ulay sat in front, facing the audience. There was a tape recorder to play sound, and a video camera to record the performance. As soon as our friends had sat down, Ulay opened his mouth wide and I turned on the tape recorder, which played the sound of a dental suction device. He sat that way for twenty minutes, then I turned off the tape recorder and Ulay closed his mouth. He then took out a heavy needle, the kind used to sew leather, attached to some thick white thread, and he sewed his lips shut.

This didn’t happen quickly. First he had to penetrate the skin below his lower lip—not easy—and then the skin above his upper lip. Also not easy. Then he pulled the thread tight and tied a knot. And then he and I changed places: Ulay sat down among the audience, and I sat in the chair he had just occupied.

“Now,” I told our friends, “you will ask me questions and I will answer as Ulay.”

“Does he feel pain?” one guy asked.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Does he feel pain?” the guy asked again.

“Could you repeat the question?”

“Does he feel pain?”

I was making him ask it again and again because in more than one way it was the wrong question. First, I had told our friends I would be answering as Ulay; therefore, the correct way to put it would have been, Do you feel pain?

But also, and more important, pain was not the issue. The piece wasn’t about pain, I told the guy; it was about decision: Ulay deciding to sew his mouth closed and me deciding to think for him, speak for him. I had learned in Rhythm 10 and Thomas Lips that pain was something like a sacred door to another state of consciousness. When you reached that door, then another side opened. Ulay had learned this, too—even before we met.

A woman spoke up. “Why are you talking when Ulay is silent?” she asked.

It didn’t matter which of us talked and which was silent, I told her. The concept was what mattered.

Was the piece about love? someone else asked. Or was it about trust?

The piece, I said, was simply about one person trusting another person to speak for him—it was about love and trust.

And with that, Ulay turned off the video camera. We had a small reception after the performance, with food and drink; Ulay kept his lips sewn and sipped some wine through a straw. He was that committed to the continuity of our piece.

We’d lived together for a year; we were so close. I just wanted to make love with Ulay all the time—it was a constant physical need. Sometimes I felt I was burning from it. At the same time, there were some things that came between us. Amsterdam itself, for one. Ulay loved the city’s freewheeling ways, its relaxed attitudes toward sex and drugs. Before we got together, he’d dabbled with drugs; he’d been a habitué of the city’s transvestite scene, a fruitful subject for his Polaroids. And though he didn’t use drugs anymore, he still drank, and he had dozens of friends he loved to drink with. He would get up in the morning and go to one of his favorite bars, Monaco, and just stay there all day. I was very, very jealous of this other life of his. Sometimes, out of sheer frustration and loneliness, I would go along with him, and have an espresso while he drank and drank. It was so boring.

I had never been interested in drugs or alcohol. It wasn’t a moral decision; they just didn’t do anything for me. The things I saw and thought in the normal course of my life were strange enough without clouding my mind.

But Ulay’s drinking worried me, because I was in love with him and he was doing nothing with his life when he sat around these bars all day. I felt I was wasting my time, too. We had done these pieces together; I knew there was so much more we could do. I kept making the case to him—not nagging him, not criticizing him, but reminding him in the most loving way that there were worlds we could conquer together. Then one day he tapped his fingers down on the table and looked me in the eye. “You’re right,” he said.

From that moment, he stopped drinking. This was a guy, after all, who was capable of doing amazing things with his body. Now he would do them along with me.

We decided to change our lives totally. We didn’t want to be tied down to an apartment, paying rent. And Amsterdam itself wasn’t doing us any favors. So with some money from Polaroid and some money from the Dutch government, we bought a cheap used truck—an old Citroën police van with ribbed sides and a high roof—and hit the road. We would become a traveling troupe of two.

We didn’t take much with us. A mattress, a stove, a filing cabinet, a typewriter, and a box for our clothes. Ulay painted the van matte black—it gave the vehicle a nice, utilitarian look, also slightly sinister. And we wrote a manifesto for our new life on the road:

ART VITAL

No fixed living place. Mobile energy.
Permanent movement. No rehearsal.
Direct contact. No predicted end.
Local relation. No repetition.
Self-selection. Extended vulnerability.
Passing limitations. Exposure to chance.
Taking risks. Primary reactions.

This would be our life for the next three years.

At the beginning of 1977 we drove to the Art Academy in Dusseldorf to perform a new piece that built on Relation in Space. In Interruption in Space we were naked, running toward each other once again, only this time instead of meeting in the middle, we each ran into one side of a thick wooden wall. The audience saw us both; each of us only saw the wall between us.

When we were invited to do a performance, we always dealt with one of two kinds of spaces: given and chosen. In this case, we were given a space with a wall in the middle of the room. This was the architecture we had to deal with. In our performance, we were investigating our different attitudes to the obstacle between us. As before, we ran faster and faster toward the middle, colliding with the wall ever more violently. A microphone inside the barrier amplified the sound of flesh hitting wood.

The audience saw separation, but in our lives we were closer each day. Our hair was exactly the same length; often we tied it back in just the same way. We were becoming a kind of melded personality. Sometimes we called each other “Glue.” Together, we were Super Glue.

We were happy—so happy that it’s hard to describe. I felt we were really the happiest people in the world. We had next to nothing, almost no money, and we were going wherever the wind blew us. The de Appel gallery had tacked up a shoebox next to their window to collect our mail. And once a week we would call them from a payphone, and they would open our letters and tell us where we’d been asked to perform next: then we would drive there. Some weeks nobody asked. That was our life.

We were so poor. Sometimes there was food, sometimes there wasn’t. I remember going to petrol stations with an empty mineral-water bottle to buy gasoline for the van—that was all we could afford. Sometimes, out of sheer pity, the gas station guy would look at our little bottle and fill it for free. In Switzerland that winter, the car doors froze shut with us inside: we had to breathe on the door handles to warm them up. Crazy.

The Citroën van we lived in for five years during Art Vital/Detour, 1977

We stopped in Belgrade, to perform at the April meeting of the SKC. We had a big crowd, thanks to my notoriety in Yugoslavia. We called the piece we did Breathing In, Breathing Out. We stuck cigarette filters in our nostrils to block the air, and we taped little microphones to our throats. We kneeled down facing each other. I blew all the air out of my lungs and Ulay breathed in all the air he could. Then we clamped our mouths together and he blew his air into my mouth. Then I blew the air back to him.

As our mouths stayed fixed together, as the sound of our breathing (and then our gasping) was amplified throughout the cultural center, we exchanged, again and again, that one lungful of air—which became less and less oxygen and more and more carbon dioxide as it was exhaled time after time. After nineteen minutes, there was no oxygen left: we stopped just before losing consciousness.

My mother hadn’t attended the performance. She couldn’t help embracing me when we visited her, but there was something withdrawn about her—I was the prodigal child returning. I had done many shameful things. She was pleasant enough with Ulay, but I could tell it freaked her out that he was German. It didn’t matter that he’d been a baby during the war: his father had fought at Stalingrad. His birth certificate had a swastika on it. She told all her friends and neighbors that he was Dutch.

With my father it was a different matter. I hadn’t seen him for almost ten years now, since the day I’d seen him kissing his young woman, Vesna, on the street. That last moment, when he saw me but was so ashamed that he wouldn’t acknowledge me, was deeply painful for me. And it appeared I’d been dreaming about him constantly. In the van, Ulay would often wake me in the middle of the night and tell me I’d been crying in my sleep and saying my father’s name over and over: Vojin, Vojin.

“Why are you crying?” Ulay would ask me. “What’s the dream?”

I didn’t know what to tell him, only that I was suffering.

“Listen,” Ulay said. “You have to write to him. Write to your father. Sit down and write the goddamn letter.”

So I did. I don’t care if you love Vesna, I wrote. The only thing that’s important to me is that I love you. I’m happy for you. I want to see you.

I sent him the letter and he never answered.

That had been over a year before.

So now we were in Belgrade and I was desperate to see Vojin. But what if he rejected me again? I told Ulay how frightened I was.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I want you to see your father. We’re going to see your father.”

I was brave in my art, but the truth was (and still is) that I went through hell before every one of my performances. Sheer terror. I would go to the bathroom twenty times. And then the moment I stepped into the work, it was something else entirely.

So I reminded myself of this, and Ulay and I went to Vojin’s house, unannounced.

He was still living with Vesna. It was morning, and we literally just went to the front door and knocked. She opened the door and broke into a huge grin. “Oh my God!” she said. “This is such a great thing.” She touched my face. “You know,” she said, “that letter you wrote to him—he reads it every day, full of tears. He’s in pieces from that letter.”

“Then why did he never answer?”

She shook her head. “You know your father,” she said.

So we entered, and he was overjoyed to see me. He immediately sent somebody to make a suckling pig. All the neighbors came to celebrate my arrival. There was a feast, many toasts with rakia, the super-strong Balkan brandy. The whole scene was like one of Emir Kusturica’s movies about Serbia—dark and ironic, but also warm and full of heart.

And my father loved Ulay. When he heard that Ulay’s father had fought at Stalingrad, it only elevated father and son in his opinion. Vojin totally accepted Ulay—he even gave him a present that night: a pair of binoculars that had belonged to an S.S. general, probably someone he had killed personally. Ulay and my father bonded, and it was wonderful to see.

The next morning we went to the Belgrade dog pound and got a puppy. It was Ulay’s idea. I had aborted his child the previous autumn, in Amsterdam, and I had no intention of ever starting a family—I simply could not reconcile fully being an artist with being a mother, too. And there in the Belgrade pound was an Albanian shepherd nursing her litter. I picked the smallest one, the runt. She was just a little ball of fluff. “What should I call her?” I asked Ulay. “Does she have a name?” I asked the attendant.

Domestic life in the van with Ulay and our dog Alba, 1977–78

“Alba,” he said.

Alba was beautiful; I loved her and she loved me in return. Nothing gave me greater pleasure than taking her for walks, being outdoors, sharing the delight of nature with her. And now that we had Alba, we were like a family.

Another phone booth, somewhere in Europe: an assistant at de Appel said an invitation had arrived in our box asking us to participate in the International Performance Week, in Bologna. A lot of important artists were going to be there—Acconci, Beuys, Burden; Gina Pane, Charlemagne Palestine, Laurie Anderson; Ben d’Armagnac, Katharina Sieverding, and Nam June Paik. We wanted to come up with a major new piece.

It was June 1977. We drove up to the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna ten days early, on our last drop of gas. We parked in front and went to talk to the museum director about a place to stay. (We could always sleep in the van, but sometimes it was nice to have bathroom facilities.) He said we could bunk in their janitor’s closet. Perfect. We set to work on planning our performance. The result was Imponderabilia.

In developing the work, we thought about a simple fact: if there were no artists, there would be no museums. From this idea we decided to make a poetic gesture—the artists would literally become the door to the museum.

Ulay built two tall vertical cases in the museum entrance, making it substantially narrower. Our performance would be to stand in this reduced opening, naked and facing each other, like doorposts or classical caryatids. Thus everyone coming in would have to turn sideways to get past us, and everyone would have to make a decision as he or she slid by: face the naked man, or the naked woman?

Ulay/Marina Abramović, Imponderabilia (performance, 90 minutes), Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, 1977

On the wall of the gallery we posted an explanatory text: “Imponderable. Such imponderable human factors as one’s aesthetic sensitivity. The overriding importance of imponderables determining human conduct.”

We hadn’t considered the all-too-ponderable consequences of human conduct when it came to money.

All the artists were supposed to be paid in advance for their participation, 750,000 lire—the equivalent of about $350. That was a fortune for us. We could live for weeks on that. And we literally didn’t have a penny. So every day leading up to the performance, we went to the museum office and said, “Can we get our money?” All the other artists were doing this, too. And every day (it was Italy) there was an excuse: There was a strike. The office manager’s cousin was in the hospital. The secretary had just left. Somebody forgot to bring in the key to the safe.

The day of the performance arrived. The public was lined up outside, waiting to get in; we were naked, ready to stand in the entrance, and we still hadn’t been paid. We were desperate. We knew that if they promised to mail us our money, we would never get it. So Ulay, completely naked, got on the elevator, went up to the fourth floor, opened the office door and said, “Where’s my money?” He was standing in front of the secretary, who was sitting at the table alone. As soon as she managed to contain her astonishment, she took the key (which had always been there, by the way), went to the safe, and handed Ulay a pile of banknotes.

Now he had 750,000 lire, he was naked, and he had to go perform immediately. Where to put our precious money? He had an idea. In the garbage pail he found a plastic bag and a rubber band. He put the banknotes in the bag, sealed it with the rubber band, and went into the public restroom. In Italy in those days, the toilets had tanks mounted on the wall. He opened the cover of one of the tanks and put the bag in, floating on the surface. Then he took the elevator downstairs, got in the doorway facing me, and the public began to file in.

We purposely stared blankly as we faced each other. So little did I know—as the people slipped by, some facing Ulay and some facing me, all with interesting expressions on their faces as they made their difficult choice—that he was worried the whole time about what might happen to our pay if someone flushed the toilet!

The performance was intended to last six hours. But after three hours, two handsome police officers came in (both chose to face me rather than Ulay). A couple of minutes later they returned with two members of the museum staff—and asked for our passports. Ulay and I looked at each other. “I don’t have mine on me,” he said.

The policemen told us that under the city laws of Bologna our performance was deemed obscene. We would have to stop immediately.

Fortunately our 750,000 lire were still floating in the toilet tank.

We were the only artists who got paid, incidentally.

We drove to Kassel, in West Germany, to participate in documenta, the once-every-five-years avant-garde arts exhibition. When we arrived we discovered that—for whatever reason—we weren’t on the list of performers. We decided to go ahead anyway. Our latest idea, Expansion in Space, was still another variation on Relation in Space and Interruption in Space—only this time, instead of running toward each other, we would stand back to back, naked, then sprint in opposite directions, each colliding with a matching obstacle, a heavy wooden column four meters high. Then we would trot backward to the starting point and begin all over again.

The performance took place in an underground parking garage, and we had our biggest audience ever by far, over a thousand people. And Expansion in Space had a big, mythic feeling, something like Sisyphus rolling the big rock up the hill. Ulay had built the columns himself, and designed them to weigh precisely double our body weights—twice 75 kilos in my case, twice 82 kilos in his case. Each weighed well over 300 pounds. They could be moved when we ran into them, but only slightly. Sometimes they wouldn’t move at all. They were hollow, with microphones attached to an amplification system inside, so they gave off a big thud with each collision. The audience watched raptly as we started simultaneously and ran into our respective columns, again and again, with a resounding impact but very limited results. Still, despite the fact that Ulay weighed more than me and was stronger than me, his column got stuck. No matter how hard he slammed against it, it wouldn’t budge.

Then, abruptly, he stepped away from the performance.

At first I didn’t realize that Ulay had stopped. Really, it was no big deal at this point in our career: in our previous piece, Interruption in Space, I had walked away when I reached my limit—it was just part of the performance. Now (unbeknownst to me) he was standing off to the side in the garage, having put some clothes on, watching me continue.

Then my column wouldn’t move, either.

I kept backing up farther, to give myself more of a running start, and maybe enough additional force to budge the obstacle. Then, all at once, I realized that my back was no longer making contact with Ulay’s. I understood he had walked away. Okay, I thought, maybe if I back up all the way into his space for my running start, I’ll really get some momentum.

Suddenly it worked. I ran the extra distance, and my column moved. The crowd cheered. But as I continued backing up and slamming into the column, over and over, the mood changed. Now I was in an altered state: the performance had become frenetic. The spectacle of this naked woman smashing into this heavy object, again and again, disturbed some of the onlookers. “Halt, halt!” they yelled, in German. “Stop, stop!” Others were still cheering lustily—it was like a football match.

Ulay/Marina Abramović, Expansion in Space (performance, 32 minutes), documenta 6, Kassel, 1977

Just then, at the back of the crowd (I found out later), the performance artist Charlotte Moorman, probably exhausted by the piece she’d just done with Nam June Paik, dropped to the floor in a faint. Ulay was busy trying to help her when something truly crazy happened. Some drunk guy in the audience jumped in front of my column with a broken beer bottle in his hand, the jagged rim pointed at me, and dared me to run into it. Strange or disturbed people, I’d found, had a way of being drawn to performance art. Fortunately the artist Scott Burton, who’d been watching, shoved the guy out of the way at the last second, and I kept running into my column—I was determined to succeed—until it actually moved a couple of inches more. Audiences at art performances usually refrained from applause, since performance was supposed to be unrehearsed, and more in the moment than theater. But after all this drama, when I finally stepped aside, a thousand people applauded.

That night, after the performance, we returned to the van to find that we had been robbed: our tape recorder and Ulay’s camera were gone, along with some clothes and blankets. Alba, who was supposed to be our watchdog, was happily playing with one of my T-shirts in the empty vehicle.

At the Cologne Art Fair that fall we did a new piece called Light/Dark. Clothed this time, and in jeans and identical white T-shirts, with our hair pulled back in identical buns, we knelt facing each other and took turns slapping each other in the face. After each slap the slapper would slap his or her knee, giving the performance a steady one-two rhythm.

Ulay/Marina Abramović, Light/Dark (performance, 20 minutes), Internationale Kunstmesse, Cologne, 1977

We started slow and picked up the pace. It looked very personal, but in fact the piece had nothing to do with our relationship or the usual significance of face-slapping: it was about using the body as a musical instrument. We’d stated beforehand that the performance would end when one of us flinched—but that never happened. Instead, we simply stopped spontaneously after twenty minutes, when we couldn’t slap each other any faster. At this point we were so close that it was as if there were a psychic link between us.

At the beginning of 1978, our wanderings took us to Sardinia. We stayed there for two months, working on a farm near the village of Orgosolo, milking their goats and sheep. It was cold on the high plains in the center of the island: at night we would make love to stay warm. This was what we had instead of television. Every morning at five A.M. we would milk two hundred sheep, then help the farmers make pecorino cheese (which I can still make). In exchange they would give us bread, sausage, and cheese.

They also gave us wool, wool that was smelly from sheep shit. I knitted sweater after sweater from this wool. These pullovers were always too big and funny looking and hot; they also tended to give you a rash if you wore them next to bare skin.

Me knitting in our van, 1977

We had no money, but I felt we were rich: the pleasure of having some pecorino cheese, a few garden-grown tomatoes, and a liter of olive oil; of making love in the car, with Alba just sleeping quietly in the corner, was beyond wealth. There is no price for that. It was so impossibly beautiful—all three of us breathing the same rhythm, the days going by….

As beautiful as it was, though, there was a worm in the apple.