A FRENCH artist entombed inside a 12-ton 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, Abraham Poincheval said he had been buoyed by how his performance has “got into people’s heads.”

    “I am traveling in this rock without moving, like an astronaut,” he said.

    The artist made headlines worldwide when the two halves of the rock closed around him 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 nook to hold supplies of water, soup and dried meat.

    “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.

    “I have some idea of time relative to the museum hours. I hear different sounds. But otherwise I have no sense of day or night,” Poincheval said.

    “I can sleep but it is very hard. It is very strange, I don’t know whether I am sleeping well or not.”

    Even though he can only move his feet and hands a few inches he said he’s quite comfortable in the rock.

    “I do not feel oppressed (by the rock), I feel completely at ease, in real connection with it,” he said.

    But he imagines it may become more challenging.

    He said, “Right now, it’s sweet. Like when you are starting to climb a mountain.

    “But I know it will get difficult,” said Poincheval, who is having his own excrement around him.

    “For now, it is OK,” he said, adding there had been “no accidents” peeing into his empty water bottles.

    “We are already locked into our own bodies,” the artist said minutes before climbing inside the rock to become what he called the boulder’s “beating heart.”

    However, he admitted that emotionally, his time inside has been something of a roller coaster.

    “It’s very complex. You pass from one feeling to another. Like you are being carried away on a raft,” he said.(SD-Agencies)