French artist living inside a rock surrounded by excrement

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Abraham Poincheval is attempting to survive inside a 12-tonne boulder inside a Paris art museum for a week. An artist entombed inside a 12-tonne rock for nearly three days has described the experience as like “tripping”, insisting he would stick it out for a week. Speaking through a crack in the limestone boulder late on Friday, Abraham Poincheval said he had been buoyed by how his performance has “got into people’s heads”.
“I am travelling in this rock without moving, like an astronaut,” he said.
The artist, who is having store his own excrement around him, made headlines worldwide when the two halves of the rock closed around him on Wednesday at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo art museum. Poincheval, 44, had carved out a hole inside the rock in his own image, just big enough for him to sit up in, with a niche to hold supplies of water, soup and dried meat.

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“People seem to be very touched. They come and talk into the crack, read poetry to me, or tell me about their nightmares or their dreams,” he said.
“They are not so much talking to me, I think, as to the stone. I am very happy that the stone has got into their heads.”
If he survives the ordeal, the performance artist who has previously spent a fortnight sewn-up inside a stuffed bear, will attempt to become a human hen and hatch a dozen eggs by sitting on them for weeks on end.
Lack of sleep rather than claustrophobia is his biggest worry inside the darkness of the rock, he confessed. Without a watch – and with only an emergency phone line – he has no way to tell the time. Even though he can only move his feet and hands a few inches, “I do not feel oppressed (by the rock), I feel completely at ease, in real connection with it. However, he admitted that emotionally, his time inside has been something of a rollercoaster.
 Poincheval is certainly no stranger to bizarre and hair-raising performances. He ate worms and beetles while living inside the bear, was buried under a rock for eight days and navigated France’s Rhone river inside a giant plastic corked bottle. He has crossed the Alps in a barrel, and last year spent a week on top of a 20-metre (65-foot) pole outside a Paris train station. The artist also spent 20 days underground as a human mole and lived like a Stone Age man with his former sidekick Laurent Tixador on a small rocky island in the Mediterranean off the southern city of Marseille.