Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective turn Luma Arles into a chamber of memory and ruin
At Luma Arles in France, Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective have transformed Correspondences into a large-scale installation that depends as much on place as on image. Spread across intersecting screens inside La Grande Halle, a 5,000 sq. m former railway engineering workshop built in 1894, the project has been reworked for Arles rather than simply expanded. The result is a presentation that feels tailored to the building’s industrial scale and its layered history.
The exhibition marks the first major European presentation of the film works and extends beyond moving image. Smith, who has collaborated with Soundwalk Collective since 2016, created new drawings and photographic works for the commission, describing them as “interpretations or expansions of ghost images.”
That phrase suits the exhibition’s atmosphere. The site itself once formed part of the Alyscamps, one of the Roman world’s best-known necropolises, and the work leans into that uncanny inheritance. Across ten multi-channel films, Smith and Soundwalk Collective move between Chernobyl, Greenland, the Black Sea, Siberia and the Camargue wetland near Arles, invoking figures including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Medea, Alfred Wegener, Peter Kropotkin and Andrei Rublev. The imagery gathers abandoned cities, extinct species, archaeological fragments, saints and voices from the past into a continuous meditation on what survives.
The project’s most distinctive formal move is its reversal of the usual relationship between sound and image. Stephan Crasneanscki, the founder of Soundwalk Collective, records acoustic environments first — glaciers, forests, oceans and contaminated landscapes — before Smith responds with poetry. Only then are the films made. In that structure, sound does not accompany the image; it determines it.
Smith’s poems do not function as captions. They move associatively through birds, bones, water, bells, wolves and light, drawing on the Symbolist legacy of Arthur Rimbaud while remaining unmistakably her own. The effect is immersive and often moving, especially in quieter works such as Children of Chernobyl (2025), which imagines a lullaby for the abandoned children of Pripyat, and the newly commissioned Le Mistral (2026).
If the exhibition occasionally risks overextending its symbolism, that ambition is also what gives Correspondences its force. It is less a sequence of discrete works than an attempt to build an archaeology of memory — one that links ecological crisis, historical loss and the stubborn persistence of images.
