Using a clinical and psychoanalytic lens, we explored the trajectory of the artist Marina Abramović, focusing on the theme of travel: voluntary exile and the crossing of bodily and psychic limits. Drawing on her biography, performances, and writings, we examined how, over the course of her work, performance art gradually became a singular response to experiences of abandonment, bodily pain, and difficulties in symbolic separation, without strictly viewing her work from the perspective of traumatic causality.

We performed a qualitative analysis of her work (performances, transitional objects, and transmission systems), combined with her interviews and autobiography. We approached her artistic trajectory using a psychoanalytic perspective inspired by Lacan's later teachings, particularly the notion of the sinthome. The latter was understood not as a formation to be interpreted, but rather as a singular means of intertwining the body, jouissance , and entrance into the social bond.

Abramović’s performances engaged a body subjected to pain, endurance, repetition, and the gaze of the Other. The evolution of her practices—from controlled self-mutilation to systems involving the public—reveals a progressive shift: the artist's body first became an operator of subjectivation, then a support for transmission (notably through the Abramović Method). Jouissance was thereby localized and given form within strict, ritualized, and temporally circumscribed frameworks.

Our work shows how Abramović elaborated, through her body, a singular sinthomatic solution. This solution made it possible to treat an excess of jouissance while opening onto an entrance into the social bond. The tension between centripetal purification of the body and the public exposure of performance constituted a central axis of this elaboration.

Marina Abramović’s work sheds light on contemporary modalities through which a subject may invent a mode of stabilization and creation in the absence of classical symbolic support. Performance art thus emerges as a site of clinical invention, where the sinthome is not resolved but put to use, becoming a motor of creation and social linkage.