• Marina and Ulay. Don't say you love me

In the early 1970s, German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen moved to Amsterdam as a Polaroid photo consultant. The American company had just released its first instant film and Ulay, who would call it forward, used the first self-revealing cartridges to unleash his creativity with autobiographical collages in which he used his own body to experiment with the notion of gender . That first collection, Renais sense , caused a certain impact, although not enough for the galleries to notice.

Ulay knew that great artists cultivate the style while geniuses apprehend what they think belongs to them . So in 1976 he traveled to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and stole from one of his rooms the painting The Poor Poet by Carl Spitzweg, the favorite of Adolf Hitler, who then hung up at the home of a Turkish immigrant from the Kreuzberg neighborhood . The whole process was documented in a photographic series aimed at delving into the worst scarred wound in Europe and defying, in passing, the repressive mentality of the Germans. So, yes, Ulay got everyone to talk about him.

That Marina Abramovic, also a budding artist and paid to the performance , lived by then not far from his home in Amsterdam was a simple coincidence, as well as the fact that the two were born the same day (three years apart) . But the truth is that when they met they both felt that a force more powerful than any patron of New York had interceded for their destinies to cross. And they were determined not to miss that opportunity.

In the following years, Ulay and Marina starred in one of the most ubiquitous and original performative duos in the art world. His manifesto, Art Vital , read as follows: "There is no fixed place of life, permanent movement, direct contact, local relations, self-selection, limitations of passage, taking risks ." That magnetic attraction, which always began in a radical concept and ended in a reckless exploration of their intimacy as a couple, led them to found a collective, The other , composed of two unique members who dressed and behaved like twins.

Marina and Ulay, in their years of union.

In the identity lab they discovered a third component, neither male nor female, which they called "that self". In Paris they reflected on the passage of time circling in a car whose mark on the pavement represented the viscosity of lost opportunities. In Death self they joined their lips until they fell to the ground poisoned by the carbon dioxide expelled by the other and in one of their most emblematic photographs, Rest Energy , they used the weight of their bodies to tighten an arch whose arrow pointed directly to Abramovic's heart .

The couple separated with a historic hug in 1988 (after traveling, each from a point, the 21,000 kilometers of the Chinese Wall) to meet again 22 years later in a crowded room of the MoMA , where their hands were intertwined on the occasion of the retrospective The artist is present that in 2010 the New York museum dedicated to the self-proclaimed «grandmother of performance ». No one imagined then that his love story would end in media judgment: Ulay claimed the benefits of his joint works and Abramovic ended up disbursing 250,000 euros .

The couple reconciled soon after. According to Abramovic in an interview for OUT OF SERIES , as soon as he learned the sentence he fled to an Ayurvedic retreat from the state of Kerala, in southern India. There he met Ulay, who had chosen the same destination as a refuge. Not only did they decide to bury the ax of war, but they promised to write a book about their existential adventures . It was Abramovic herself who, from the Instagram account of the artistic institution that bears her name, reported on March 2 of Ulay's death at 76. "He was an exceptional artist and human being, whom we will miss," he lamented in the statement. " It is comforting to know on this day that his art and legacy will live forever ."

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