Greater than a decade after the sound artwork platform Soundwalk Collective first started collaborating with the punk poet Patti Smith, their ever-evolving multimedia mission has reached its most bold incarnation but. Opening at Luma Arles within the south of France, Correspondences (till 8 November) marks the primary main European presentation of the work, bringing collectively all eight movies created between 2023 and 2026 alongside two new commissions, in addition to Smith’s drawings, images, handwritten texts and archival installations created particularly for the event.
The setting is integral to the exhibition’s influence. Put in throughout giant intersecting screens on the centre of the 5,000 sq. m La Grande Halle—an unlimited former railway engineering workshop in-built 1894 and now one of many principal exhibition areas on the Luma campus—the work occupies a scale that few establishments might accommodate. Like a musician graduating from intimate venues to a stadium, Correspondences has been essentially reimagined for Arles moderately than merely enlarged.
Smith, who has collaborated with Soundwalk Collective since 2016, additionally used the fee to develop the mission past shifting picture. Engaged on website in Arles, she produced new drawings and photographic works that she described throughout a preview as “interpretations or expansions of ghost pictures”.
Patti Smith and Stephan Crasneanscki © Victor&Simon – Joana Luz
“I prefer to work on website,” Smith stated at a preview of the present, explaining that the varied components “all relate to at least one one other… All the pieces is a part of understanding the world we’re residing in: ecological disaster, the obligations of an artist, the flexibility to speak on many ranges in lots of realms, because the shaman does, and likewise to channel the previous in addition to the longer term.”
Ghosts, in actual fact, appear to inhabit nearly each nook of the exhibition—and never solely metaphorically. Lengthy earlier than La Grande Halle turned from a busy ironworks that constructed steam engines into an industrial graveyard, and was then reworked into an artwork cathedral, the location fashioned a part of the Alyscamps, one of many Roman world’s best-known necropolises. All through the Center Ages, our bodies had been transported from throughout Europe for burial right here, lending an uncanny historic resonance to an exhibition populated by deserted cities, extinct species, archaeological relics, saints, mythological figures and voices from the previous.
That preoccupation with what survives runs all through the set up. Throughout ten multi-channel movies, Smith and Soundwalk Collective transfer between Chernobyl, Greenland, the Black Sea, Siberia and the wilderness of the Camargue wetland that edges Arles, invoking figures as various because the Italian author and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, the sorceress of Greek mythology Medea, the German scientist Alfred Wegener, the Russian thinker Peter Kropotkin and the Russian artist Andrei Rublev. Melting glaciers launch traces of deep time; Roman shipwrecks emerge from beneath the Mediterranean; discarded movie rushes purchase new lives; the youngsters of Chernobyl are imagined sleeping till radiation subsides. Collectively they kind much less a sequence of narratives than a steady archaeology of reminiscence.
Maybe the mission’s most unique concept is formal moderately than thematic. As an alternative of treating sound as accompaniment, Soundwalk Collective reverses the connection between soundtrack and picture. The group’s founder, the sound artist Stephan Crasneanscki, first information acoustic environments—from glaciers, forests, oceans and contaminated landscapes—earlier than Smith responds with poetry. Solely then are the movies made. “The soundtrack dictates what you are going to see,” Crasneanscki defined on the preview.
That inversion helps clarify why Smith’s contribution hardly ever feels descriptive. Her poems don’t caption the photographs however inhabit them, shifting associatively by way of recurring motifs of birds, bones, water, bells, wolves and lightweight. Smith has lengthy cited the French poet Arthur Rimbaud as a formative affect, and his Symbolist method is palpable right here. Quite than explaining concepts, she accumulates pictures till they generate an emotional or religious environment. That means emerges much less by way of narrative than by way of rhythm, repetition and juxtaposition—incantations that mirror her greatest identified work as a musician. The cumulative impact of sound and picture, movie and textual content, is considered one of complete immersion.
Set up view of Correspondences by Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith within the La Grande Halle at Luma Arles, France © Victor&Simon – Grégoire d’Ablon
This reaches its most shifting expression in quieter works comparable to Kids of Chernobyl (2025), by which Smith imagines a lullaby for the deserted kids within the metropolis of Pripyat, or the newly commissioned Le Mistral (2026), the place Mary Magdalene’s mythic arrival within the Camargue unfolds by way of underwater archaeology, birdsong and the voice of Sara, the Black Madonna revered on the close by city of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
Elsewhere, amongst Smith’s newly created works on paper for the exhibition, we see the phrases, “The Earth Is a Cranium That Refuses to Clarify Itself”—a phrase repeated all through the set up that would nearly stand as its manifesto. But Correspondences additionally exposes the dangers of working at such an elevated conceptual register. Mythology, ecology, archaeology, faith, politics and deep time are weighty issues that may get misplaced within the vaguery of poetry. At moments, the exhibition threatens to break down into the acquainted universalism of up to date artwork, the place each reference carries the identical symbolic weight just because it belongs to a shared language of significance. The impact can really feel much less revelatory than overreaching.
Smith herself, nevertheless, appears cautious of that interpretation. “We’re not preaching to anybody,” she says in a dialog with Crasneanscki, printed to accompany the exhibition. “We’re simply exhibiting that these are truths… [People] have to see what’s occurring to our mountains, to our glaciers, our water. So we simply preserve accumulating proof.”
It’s that stress—between mystical invocation and materials witness—that in the end provides Correspondences its emotional pressure. The exhibition might sometimes disappear beneath the burden of its personal symbolism, however it’s repeatedly rescued by the physicality of sound and the presence of Smith’s voice. Just like the ghosts that hang-out each the set up and the bottom beneath it, her poetry refuses to elucidate the world. As an alternative, it lingers inside it, asking us not merely to look, however to pay attention.
• Correspondences, Luma Arles, France, till 8 November
