A Novel Returns to Marina Abramović's Most Dangerous Performance
Marie Petitcuénot's "Heures sauvages" draws on "Rhythm 0," the 1974 Naples piece in which the artist let the public do as it wished with her body for six hours.
In 1974, in Naples, Marina Abramović stood motionless in a room with 72 objects laid out on a table — among them a feather and a loaded revolver — and let the audience use any of them on her body for six hours, according to France Culture. The performance, one of the most extreme in the history of body art, is the starting point for "Heures sauvages," a novel by Marie Petitcuénot published by Héloïse d'Ormesson in 2026.
Petitcuénot was interviewed on France Culture's "Les Midis de Culture," where she described the book as an exploration of violence, freedom and barbarity, built out of what happened when Abramović ceded control of her own body to strangers for a single afternoon.
The source material gives no further detail on the novel's form, length or how closely it follows the historical record of the performance, known among art historians as "Rhythm 0."
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
