Can Marina Abramović get Glastonbury to be silent for seven minutes?

Serbian artist hopes Friday’s ‘public intervention’ will make festival goers reflect on the current state of the world

Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage has played host to some of the loudest rock bands in the world and mass sing-alongs with thousands of participants, but on Friday the artist Marina Abramović will step out and ask the crowd to do something different: remain silent for seven minutes.

“I am terrified,” said Abramović, whose performance pieces have made her one of the most famous artists in the world. “I don’t know any visual artists who have done something like this in front of 175,000 to 200,000 people. The largest audience I ever had was 6,000 people in a stadium and I was thinking ‘wow’, but this is really beyond anything I’ve done.”