FACILITATORS & MAI NETWORK

DOCUMENTED PEOPLE / TRANSMISSION NETWORK

PAULA GARCIA

Brazilian performance artist. Her practice includes Noise Body, in which she wears magnetised armour while collaborators throw large nails onto it until the accumulated weight becomes difficult to sustain physically.

Marina Abramović met Paula Garcia through Luciana Brito's gallery in São Paulo. Abramović later wanted to travel through Brazil in search of what she described as places of power and people or practices whose forms of energy escaped rational explanation. Paula researched and organised the journey.

The trip included encounters with healers, mediums and ayahuasca rituals in Chapada Diamantina and became connected with The Space in Between. Paula and Marina subsequently travelled to crystal mines; large quartz pieces collected during this period became connected with Abramović's transitory objects.

Paula later co-curated Terra Comunal, MAI's first major full programme in São Paulo in 2015. She has taught Cleaning the House since 2018.

BILLY ZHAO

Billy Zhao belonged to the early MAI team assembled around 2012. Abramović transmitted her method to this group through exercises, including sorting and counting rice and lentils.

Conceptual connection: repetition / attention / time / apparently purposeless labour / concentration / de-automatization.

THANOS ARGYROPOULOS

Thanos is important both administratively and conceptually. His financial calculation changed the ontology of the institution itself: economics indirectly transformed an architectural institution into a nomadic artistic structure.

ECONOMICS → INSTITUTIONAL FORM → ARTISTIC METHOD

Serge Le Borgne and Lynsey Peisinger remain part of the wider MAI network where supported by source material, without artificial prominence.