ARLES.- LUMA Arles announces Correspondences, 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.
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Showcased at LUMA Arles as an immersive installation, the exhibition marks the first major European presentation of the project. It brings together the complete body of Correspondences audiovisual works produced to date—eight films created between 2023 and 2026—as well as two new works commissioned by LUMA and anchored in the Camargue. Alongside these works, the exhibition also includes sound compositions, archival material, prints, and installations.
The 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, natural scientist, 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 these acoustic 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 turns 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 an 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 primacy of vision, allowing sound to shape, unsettle, and expand its visual counterpart. While field recordings heighten a sense of presence, they also evoke absence.
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.
Within the distinctive setting of La Grande Halle, the exhibition places pairs of films in correspondence: Children of Chernobyl and The Acolyte, the Artist and Nature; Medea and Pasolini; Prince of Anarchy and Cry of the Lost; Burning 1946-2024 and Mass Extinction 1946-2024; The Melting and Le Mistral. Through fragmentation and recombination, the installation opens up a third space of recollection, resonance, and new associations. Visitors are invited to weave their own path through the images, sounds, and narratives that surround them.
Medea (2023-2026), for example, follows Soundwalk Collective’s journey across the Black Sea region, where they collected sounds along the imagined path of the mythological figure. Over these recordings and unused footage from Pasolini’s film Medea (1969), Patti Smith’s voice embodies Medea after the murder of her children, giving form to grief, exile, and irreversible rupture. Its companion work, Pasolini (2023-2026), reflects on the final moments before Pier Paolo Pasolini’s unresolved assassination in 1975.
A newly commissioned set of companion films created specifically for the exhibition turns to the Camargue as a territory shaped by water, myth, environmental change, and human presence. Le Mistral (2026) interlaces together images of subaquatic archaeological excavations of Roman shipwrecks dating back to the first and second centuries CE from the Rhône River and Mediterranean basin, evoking submerged civilizations returning to visibility. Patti Smith imagines Mary Magdalene’s arrival ashore.
The poem closes with a song in which Patti Smith gives voice to Sara, the enigmatic Black Madonna venerated at the Sanctuary of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and revered by Roma communities.
Le Mistral is set in dialogue with The Melting (2026), which evokes the accelerating disappearance of glaciers in Greenland and the Alps. In contrast, melting glaciers and thawing permafrost release ancient remains, animals, microorganisms, and matter once frozen in deep time. Across these works, water appears as both material and metaphor, treated here, in Stephan Crasneanscki’s words, “as a spatial and acoustic presence rather than an image”.
At intervals within the cycle of the ten multi-channel film installation, the space enters a second movement in which sound takes precedence. Field recordings of dripping water, captured from the holy well in the Church of Saintes-Maries-dela- Mer and from the cave of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume—one of the oldest pilgrimage sites in the Christian world, where Saint Mary Magdalene is said to have lived for thirty years—reverberate through the space. Nearby, flickering lights reveal a cabin, The Outpost (2026), reconstructed from an archival photograph of Alfred Wegener, born in Berlin in 1880 and disappeared during an expedition in Greenland in 1930. Best known for his theory of continental drift, Wegener appears here as a figure of scientific imagination and physical endurance whose explorations opened up new ways of thinking across geology, climate, and deep time.
On either side of The Outpost, a series of prints hover between revelation and disappearance. Their spectral images draw forth abstract Siberian shamanic cosmology, landscapes, and spirit animals. Across these ghostly surfaces, Patti Smith has inscribed delicate lines of poetry and subtle marks of color. Combining pencil, pastel, and natural inks developed by Atelier LUMA from local plants growing in saline soils, including sea lavender, Baccharis halimifolia, and Tamarix gallica, the works enter a circulation of local materials, symbols, and meanings, suggesting endurance, adaptation, and renewal.
Two large-scale light tables assemble the archival, poetic, and material constellations that fed into the audiovisual works. Composed as a complex atlas of visual layerings and overlapping image strata, the first brings together references to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Medea, combining Patti Smith’s handwritten poems, Roman relics recovered from shipwrecks, materials connected to Pasolini’s death, and chemically altered photographs. The second extends this layered method to the Camargue, assembling traces of Mary Magdalene and Sara, alongside local maps, herbaria, subaquatic drawings, archaeological fragments and artifacts, satellite imagery, and Siberian shamanic relics. Across both works, images, texts and objects form an archive in which myth, ecology, loss, and memory associate and converge.
Correspondences offers a poignant and poetic homage to the natural world, to creativity, and to resilience in the face of loss and transformation. Visitors are invited into a space of heightened listening, where distant geographies and submerged histories reverberate in the present.
