Here´s what Marina Abramović had to say.
About her childhood... My theory was always that if you have a really tragic childhood, the better the artist you become – if you´re really happy it's different, nothing comes out of happiness. My mother and father were political careerists. They are both national heroes from the second world war – and having a child was not on their agenda, so they just gave me to my grandmother. One day, I was waiting for my grandmother. She was praying in the church, and I saw this thing in the font where you have to dip your finger to cross yourself. I was thinking that if I drank all this water then I would get holy. I was six years old and I stood up on a chair and drank the water. I just got sick. I didn´t get holy. Apart from that, my entire childhood was about going around the kitchen. The kitchen was the centre of my world. The kitchen was the place where I would tell my grandmother my dreams. The kitchen was the place where she would tell me stories, and the kitchen was the place where all the secrets were told. It was a kind of place where the spiritual world and the daily world met and mixed.
http://www.dazeddigital.com/view/default.aspx?Category=22&ArticleID=5849...
