When performance artists Marina Abramović and her partner, Ulay, decided to end their twelve-year relationship—as lovers and artistic collaborators—they marked its ending by walking the length of the Great Wall of China. “People put so much effort into starting a relationship and so little effort into ending one,” Abramović explained. On March 30, 1988, Abramović started walking from the eastern end of the Great Wall, the Gulf of Bohai on the Yellow Sea, and Ulay began walking from the western edge, in the Gobi Desert, and they each walked for ninety days, covering roughly 2,500 kilometers, until they met in the middle, where they shook hands to say goodbye. At a retrospective of Abramović’s work in Stockholm, two video screens showed scenes from The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk. One screen showed Abramović walking past camels on hard dirt covered with snow, while the other showed Ulay hiking with a walking stick over green hills. The tapes were running on a continuous loop, and it seemed beautiful to me that on those screens, years after their breakup, these two lovers still walked constantly toward each other.
Leslie Jamison, “The Breakup Museum: Archiving the Way We Were”
