"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."
Abramović, who is calling the event a "public intervention" rather than a performance, will address the crowd from the Pyramid stage at 5.55pm, just before PJ Harvey's set, and then ask the crowd to be quiet as part of a piece she is calling Seven Minutes of Collective Silence.
The Serbian artist recognised that asking thousands of festivalgoers, some who will have been onsite for two days, to keep stumm may be difficult but she hoped they would take the moment to reflect on the state of the world.
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