CORRESPONDENCES is an evolving collaboration between Soundwalk Collective, led by artist Stephan Crasneanscki with producer Simone Merli, and iconic writer, artist, and performer Patti Smith.
Arising from over a decade of conversations, CORRESPONDENCES brings together sound, film, and poetry to conjure landscapes where artistic creation, scientific imagination, and political struggle are set against the fragility of the natural world.
Showcased at LUMA Arles as an immersive installation, CORRESPONDENCES marks the first major European presentation of the project. It brings together the complete body of audiovisual works produced by this collaboration to date. Two newly commissioned works turn to the Camargue, a territory shaped by water, myth, environmental change, and human presence, from the settlement of the area in Roman antiquity to Provençal traditions surrounding Mary Magdalene. The exhibition places pairs of films in dialogue, using fragmentation and recombination to open up a third space of memories, resonance, and new associations. Visitors are invited to construct their own path through the images, sounds, and narratives that surround them.
Alongside the film works, the exhibition includes sound compositions, archival material, prints, and installations. The project approaches landscapes as a physical terrain, but also as a mental archive of places imagined, mythologized, remembered, and emotionally inhabited. Throughout, these are scoured for traces of inherited images, memory, myth, historical wounds, and political desire.
The different works invoke intrepid explorers and visionaries who charted new mental and physical territories across time and place, in pursuit of knowledge. Among them are figures such as Andrei Rublev, the great medieval Russian painter of icons and frescoes; Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet, writer, and filmmaker; Alfred Wegener, the German climatologist, geologist, and polar researcher; and Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, political philosopher, and geographer.
Sound is at the heart of CORRESPONDENCES. Stephan Crasneanscki has gathered field recordings from some of the planet’s most remote and vulnerable environments, from melting glaciers to deserts, forests, wetlands, and contaminated areas. Unfolding as sonic environments, the recordings summon memories that travel across distant geographies, histories, and natural habitats.
Responding to the acoustic textures of these physical landscapes through intimate poetry and song, Patti Smith channels a multiplicity of voices that move between bodies, histories, and states of being. She embodies by turn the children of Chernobyl, the high priestess and sorceress Medea, forces of nature, and a host of human and more-than-human presences. At once exalting and foreboding, her voice emerges as invocation, a lullaby, and a lament, reflecting on the entanglements of nature, human history, and artistic creation. Interwoven with archival and original footage, these sonic fields challenge the dominance of vision, allowing sound to shape, unsettle, and expand its visual counterpart.
While sounds and images heighten a sense of presence, others also evoke absence. Spectral archival images garnered by Stephan Crasneanscki are recomposed and ultimately responded to by Patti Smith through subtle line and poetry. CORRESPONDENCES is thus an archive of a disappearing world, haunted by traces, ruins, extinction, and memory. Within this constellation, the figures of the poet, artist, and shaman converge as healer and diviner, intermediaries or messengers between the visible and the unseen, the material and the spiritual.
CORRESPONDENCES offers a poetic homage to the natural world, to creativity, and to resilience in the face of loss and transformation. It proposes sound as a carrier of memory, and art as a way of attending to the world anew. Visitors are invited into a space of heightened attention and listening, where distant geographies and submerged histories reverberate in the present.
