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AFP
A French artist emerged"a little stunned" from a week entombed inside a 12-tonne rock and thanked it for having made him feel"so welcome."
Abraham Poincheval, 44, had difficulty walking as he was helped from the stone onto a chair before being taken away for a medical examination.
"It is normal that I should feel a little stunned after spending a week inside a rock," he told reporters half an hour later.
"I would like to thank it," Poincheval added."It made me so welcome."
He had carved out a hole inside a 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.
Poincheval's extreme performance in a Paris art museum has become something of a sensation in the French capital. Crowds thronged the Palais de Tokyo to watch him inside through an infra-red camera.
Hundreds tried to talk to him through a crack in the rock, with the artist saying that some had read him poetry, played guitar or told him about their dreams and nightmares.
But the artist, no stranger to bizarre and death-defying feats, admitted there were moments when the experience"shook" him with"some huge moments when I lost myself.
"I had the feeling that I was just a particle inside this mineral world," he said.
Sometimes he even felt he and the rock were one and the same.
"I felt I was a stone at the side of a path and at night I was a much wilder rock."
Poincheval, who previously spent a fortnight sewn-up inside a stuffed bear, had earlier said through a crack in the limestone boulder that his confinement had been"like tripping."
"I am travelling in this rock without moving, like an astronaut," he said, buoyed up by the fact that he had"got into people's heads."
Dubbed France's most extreme artist, he will attempt to become a human hen later this month and hatch a dozen eggs by sitting on them for weeks on end.
Lack of sleep rather than claustrophobia was his biggest worry inside the darkness of the rock, he said.
