This has been a challenging year, and many of us are not able to be with loved ones this Christmas. Performance artist and environmental grandmother Marina Abramović suggests we turn instead to the plant world. Why not share your emotions with a tree? she asks. It could be the best Christmas present you can give yourself. By Jeremy Torr

New York, December 2020. “This is my message for the public. Please, go to the park near you. Pick the tree you like. Hold the tree tight. Really tight,” says Marina Abramović. “And just pour your heart into it.”

Abramović is not your usual tree-hugger. She calls herself a ‘grandmother of performance art’ and uses strong messages of endurance, participation, feminism and the limitations of human life in her work, drawing on such jolly aspects as "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body." Not the kind of person you would usually expect to be giving uplifting advice on the back end of one of the most dismal all-round years in recent memory.

But the Serbia-born conceptual and performance artist, who is related to war heroes and a previous Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, credits her experiences in the Amazon jungle with giving her an insight into the healing benefits of forests.

“I was in the Amazon, and saw how the local people would talk to and dance to the sequoia trees,” she says. “It was incredibly moving and emotional, and I thought wow - why don’t I create something like that that works for me? So I created this (performance) work called Complaining to a Tree.”

“Trees are like human beings. They have feelings, they have intelligence, and they are perfect silent listeners,” she says. To make things a little easier to bear in a non-contact world, she urges people to hug a tree tightly for no less than 15 minutes and pour out your problems into its heart (or bark). If you do this properly, Abramović promises you will feel “rejuvenated.”

“One important thing is that you really choose a tree that you like,” she advises. “It can be small and even not that beautiful a tree. But you have some relation to this tree, emotionally; don’t pick the tree because of its beauty. Pick the tree because of its smell, the bark, the leaves, whatever triggers your affection.”

She adds that as this is something that you will probably be doing for the first time, a journey into the unknown as it were, you should proceed slowly and gently. “Get out of your security box and do something that is different. Don’t immediately hug the tree. Just feel the energy of the tree, maybe even not touching it but just holding your hands a little bit above.”

Once you are on good terms with the tree, then – and this is the important bit according to Abramović - you can then tell it your problems as it is probably a very good listener. “Complain your heart into it. This is the whole idea,” she says. “Complain to the tree for a minimum of 15 minutes. It’s the best healing that you can do.”

The artist says that she is hopeful this way of pouring out your troubles - to a tree rather than your next of kin - will catch on; that tree-hugging and talking to will create a new trend. She says her her hope is that “actually people will run to the parks and start complaining to trees. This is one way of healing at this moment of our history.”

Although her reasons for getting close to trees are maybe more artistic than the average tree-hugger, there could well be a lot of sense in what she advises. Trees are alive, they don’t talk back, and they are always there, waving happily at you through the window no matter what the lockdown regulations.

“Complaining to a tree is also a way of getting energy out of the tree - to you,” she argues. “The tree is actually healing the complaint. You’re opening your heart. You’re just telling it all your negativity and what bothers you in your life.

“Everything is absorbed into the tree. And you feel rejuvenated. You feel happy after that.”