Marina Abramović is turning 80 in November, and she is not slowing down. In an interview with Artnet's Min Chen, the pioneering performance artist described a relentless schedule: new exhibitions at Copenhagen's Cisternerne and Venice's Gallerie dell'Accademia, an installation at New York's Balloon Museum, and a touring engagement of her four-hour opus Balkan Erotic Epic, which travels to Berlin in October and New York in December. She is also publishing Long Life, Short Stories with Rizzoli on October 6 — a non-chronological collection of stories, drawings and photographs spanning her Belgrade upbringing to key career moments, including how Balkan Baroque got her booted from the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale. "You get closer to understanding where I come from — and that I'm not boring," she said of the book. Abramović spoke candidly about aging: she survived a pulmonary embolism in 2023, now works six to eight hours a day instead of around the clock, and selects her openings carefully. "My enthusiasm is 20 years old, but my body is not," she said. "I am fully active and I want to stay that way. I want to show people that it's actually possible." Her humor, she insisted, is underappreciated — she finds the clash of ancient ritual and sexuality in Balkan Erotic Epic hilarious. Reflecting on decades of underpaid labor ("The first time I was paid to do a performance was at MoMA — I was 65"), she distilled her philosophy: "Nobody has ever done anything from happiness. Suffering makes you work hard."