Crickets in Ibiza, traditional Georgian music, sounds of the Amazon River recently filled the cavernous Chelsea outpost of Kurimanzutto. Across sound pieces, eight two-channel films, mixed-media collages, drawings, and sculpture, Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective contemplated our current environmental crisis through the lens of demise, rebirth, and chance.
“I look at places that hold invisible stories and memories,” Soundwalk Collective founder Stephan Crasneanscki told ARTnews. His decade-long collaboration with Smith involves sourcing field recordings from locations with various historical and emotional resonance that he shares with Smith, and her poetic responses are then mixed with the recordings. As with the rest of her practice, these spoken words are typically improvised. “I find it liberating to respond to pure sound and sonic frequencies,” Smith told ARTnews via a series of voice notes.
Crasneanscki considers these sounds as a “gateway” to an alternative contemplative space outlined by Smith’s poetry. The recent Kurimanzutto exhibition was fittingly titled “Correspondences,” and juxtaposed a range from romantic references to 20th-century auteurs, like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea (starring Maria Callas) and notes by Jean-Luc Godard’s archive, with footage of alarming realities: changing silhouettes of glaciers through perpetual melting, the Chernobyl explosion, and the destruction of the Amazon.
“Hearing women’s voices from the part of Georgia [ancient Colchis] where Medea was from as well as the mountains, the sea, and the frequencies drew out another level of insight and emotion,” Smith said of their invocation of the Greek sorceress and princess Medea, who murdered her children with Jason out of revenge for his infidelity.
For “Correspondences,” Crasneanscki made several trips to the Amazon forest to record footage of nature in rapid collapse. In Chernobyl, he met groups of young squatters who call the dilapidated abandoned city of Pripyat home, where he had traveled to record the sounds of thousands of pianos destroyed by radiation. “Some of the best piano schools used to be there, and now a group of young families live there without education or safety,” he said.
In the 15-minute-long video, Children of Chernobyl (2024), Smith’s echoing voice—“we were soldiers with no war”—cuts through sequences of decaying wreckage and nature, ending with a shot of a child. In one section, she reminds visitors that wildfires have wreaked havoc across the globe, causing the extinction of numerous species, since the year of her birth in 1946; its timing in January as wildfires ravaged part of Los Angeles felt especially timely. In Mass Extinction 1946-2024 (2024), she lists some of them out: “2014, Christmas Island Forest skink; 2015, Pinta giant tortoise; and in 2016, I turned 70 years old,” against the images of taxidermy animals and specimens from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and National Museum of Natural History in Kiev. Smith considers this ongoing collaboration an effort to voice environmental collapse in a way that is “freeing and conducive to improvising” and that emphasizes the “sonic destruction happening beneath our seas because of drilling for oil.”
Crasneanscki, who partners with Simone Merli to produce Soundwalk Collective’s final recordings, said he admires the time-defying, Proustian power of sounds: “Landscapes and places change but the sound of the rain, wind, or footsteps have been the same for hundreds or thousands of years.”
Both voyagers by nature, Smith and Crasneanscki settle on new ideas through long walks in cities around the world. Their first collaboration, Killer Road (2016), came after a chance meeting on a transatlantic flight; it featured Smith reciting German singer Nico’s final poems that were mixed with the deep tones of a reed organ and echoes from the road where Nico died in Ibiza in 1988.
Over the course of the decade-long friendship, “long conversations in Berlin or Paris about books, poetry, and film suddenly lead to an idea to work on,” Crasneanscki explained. He often travels to a destination without a dedicated intention, instead seeking “sonically interesting stories, similar to walking blindfolded, and search a path to discover.” He compared Smith’s current artistic output to that Rembrandt’s “unmatchable” late period, when the Dutch master conveyed “depth with gravitas” as Smith does with her “passion for her subject matters through poetry and defining what it means to be an artist.”
After its five-week run in New York, a version of “Correspondences” touched down in São Paulo at Casa Iramaia, an off-site location of Brazilian gallery Mendes Wood DM. Titled “A AMAZONIA,” this iteration featured abstract drawings which Crasneanscki made with red dye from boiled Amazonian tree leaves. “The color reminds me that the Amazon is the earth’s bloodline,” he said. Smith added her own words around the drawings’ edges while listening to the sounds of Amazon from Medellín, Colombia, and Apolo, Bolivia, recorded by Crasneanscki. “I tried to think through the mind of the Amazon River,” Smith said, adding that she could “hear the Amazon’s pride in being the longest river in the world.”
Smith and Soundwalk hope to bring their performances calling attention to the destruction of the Amazon around the world, traveling to Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Santiago, Chile, as well as Milan for Bottega Veneta’s Fall-Winter 2025 fashion show in Milan where they performed at the fashion house’s new headquarters on Palazzo San Fedele to honor the legacy of late Italian architect and photographer Carlo Mollino. Smith visited Mollino’s infamous Milan apartment in which he photographed the city’s sex workers in 1970s, and she brought a version of the architect’s bed to the stage. In April, a new iteration of “Correspondences” will go on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, in addition to theatrical performances in Tokyo and Kyoto.
The sonic reverberations of nature continue to bear on the correspondences between Smith and Crasneanscki. “I could write a hundred more stories, not coming from me but from the Amazon’s consciousness,” Smith said. “The beauty in working together is not only the empathy of friendship and the lack of ego but to magnify our subject matter and inspire the people through poetry and sound.”
Soundwalk Collective & Patti Smith, Mass Extinction 1946-2024 (excerpt), 2024. Courtesy the artists and Kurimanzutto
