Pilar Zeta and Marina Abramović meet in a dialogue that quickly exceeds the frame of art and slips into something more unstable: perception itself as material. What begins with questions about imagination and creation unfolds into a deeper inquiry into how reality is assembled—whether it is something fixed to be observed, or something constantly edited by attention, intention, and internal state.

Abramović grounds herself in radical presence, where meaning is not constructed but encountered, and where the artist must disappear in order for anything to arrive. As she says: “First you have to make yourself empty to create space for the idea to come in.” In her logic, nothing is added—only revealed. Even symbols are not searched for, but recognised when they appear. “Symbols are important when they appear in front of you. You don’t force them or search for them.”

Zeta moves through a different register—one where perception multiplies rather than clears. For her, imagination behaves like another layer of reality, sometimes so immersive that the present dissolves and returns altered. She describes this threshold state directly: “I experience imagination as another layer of reality.” And the instability it produces is not theoretical, but physical in effect: “I enter the work thinking I’m shaping it, but it rearranges me instead, like I’m the material.”

Between them, a tension forms that is less a disagreement than a divergence in operating systems: one built on subtraction, the other on expansion; one on emptiness, the other on overflow. Yet both converge on the same inevitability—creation is not controlled from above, but something that acts back on the maker.

Abramović rejects the conditions of comfort entirely, insisting on displacement as method: “I don’t have a home. I don’t have a studio either. I hate studios and believe they are bad for the artist.” For her, the world itself is the studio—especially its most remote, unmediated forms. “The planet is my home.”

Zeta, by contrast, constructs and destroys her environment in cycles, shaping space as an extension of internal fluctuation rather than rejecting it. Her process is not stability but continuous reconfiguration, mirroring the psychological terrain she moves through.

Still, both return to a shared mechanism: creation as transformation rather than expression. Abramović states it directly: “Work changes me, not the other way around.” Zeta arrives at the same point through reversal—realising that what she makes begins to reorganise her in return.

Across solitude, symbols, nature, and the act of bringing form into matter, the conversation settles into a final convergence. Whether through emptiness or excess, discipline or dissolution, both point toward the same condition: that to create is to be altered by what is created. And in that exchange—between control and surrender, visibility and disappearance—something invisible becomes real, even if neither of them fully claims to understand how.