A French performance artist has just completed a week's stint living inside a boulder.
Abraham Poincheval spent a week living inside a rock, sucking oxygen through tiny air holes and storing days' worth of his own waste in bottles closely around himself.
French artist Abraham Poincheval waves as he exits the two halves of the rock in which he has been been entombed. | Image: Zacharie Scheurer AP/Press Association Images
"I'm a little dazed, which I imagine is totally normal after one week living in a rock," he told reporters who had gathered at Paris' Palais de Tokyo museum to see him emerge from the more than 10-ton boulder.
He then thanked the rock, "for having been so enthusiastic about welcoming me."
"It's this strange feeling of a floating world, an incredible floating in this mineral capsule," Poincheval said. "There are very strong moments of getting dizzy, where the world is shaking monstrously.
"It's a moment of happiness, it's a gift," he added, "but at the same time one must stay clear-headed. There are very strong moments where you lose yourself, where suddenly you don't know anymore where you are."
Previously, he lived under a rock, in a hole in the ground beneath a bookshop in 2012, which he called 604,800 Seconds.
In 2014, he spent nearly two weeks living inside a bear carcass at the Parisian Hunting and Wildlife Museum, repeating a feat he'd performed the year before. While inside the bear, he subsisted on worms and beetles.
"For him this act signifies a rebirth, a rite of passage, to pass from the world of the dead to that of the living," read a 2014 press release.
What's next?
For his next project, Poincheval will be returning later this month to the Palais de Tokyo, where he will begin a work he simply calls Oeuf (or Egg, in English).
Beginning March 29, he will be sitting atop a dozen hen's eggs for approximately three to four weeks until they (hopefully) hatch, only taking one half-hour break each day.
Those chicks that hatch, he told The Guardian, "will go and live with my parents."
