Giulio Marchetti's new performance pays homage to Marina Abramović

Artist Giulio Marchetti (Rome, 1982) has created a new performance titled "The artist is present but…" as a tribute to Marina Abramović's iconic work "The Artist is Present." In Abramović's original, she sat motionless facing a visitor across a table. Marchetti disrupts this dual presence, imposing solitude mediated by screens rather than gazes. The work questions whether such mediated presence is true presence or an absence. Marchetti, also an illustrator and poet, has previously reworked Michelangelo's Pietà in the Vatican, creating a copy where the Virgin mourns a physically absent Christ, made present only through a VR headset. More recently, he painted a portrait of singer Achille Lauro as a "stripper," referencing Lauro's song performed at Eurovision in Turin for San Marino.