Soundscape

Patti Smith’s voice is playing over speakers as she moves throughout Kurimanzutto’s New York gallery, making the finishing touches on her exhibition an hour before it opens. “Even in the '70s, I was always doing something right at the very end, because certain things just come to you right at the very end,” she explains. 

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Smith is wearing a black blazer, white T-shirt, navy pants tucked into black combat boots, glasses, and two long white braids. She makes her way to a series of scientific images of scans of writing by 11th century scribes on animal skin hung on the wall. “My role is the job of the scribe and the interpreter,” she explains, pencil in hand, as she stands in front of an early 18th century drafting tool embedded in glass and framed by two large black stones with shallow, smooth circles carved into them. “In my mind, there is a print from the soul of the stones. So I just identify them.”

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Throughout Kurimanzutto, there are drawings, photo-based works, and cases of ephemera. “There's a logic to every single thing that is here,” says Smith. “There's nothing here just as decoration.” In one room, a compilation of films is projected across the long wall: Smith and Soundwalk Collective founder Stephan Crasneanscki’s ongoing audio-visual, site-specific collaboration, “Correspondences.” The project has taken many forms over the last decade, morphing in workshops, screenings, readings, and live performances (including a current South American tour). Now, for the first time, it is displayed in full at a gallery, with plans for more exhibitions in Asia this spring.

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The two met on a plane when Crasneanscki was reading a book of Nico’s poems. Intrigued, Smith learned he was going to visit the late Velvet Underground singer’s death site in Ibiza, where she lay unconscious overnight before she was found the next day in July of 1988. The sound of crickets was notoriously loud, and he was going on a pilgrimage to record them in the hopes of finding a poet to recite Nico’s words over the field recordings. Smith took no convincing. Soon, the two were working together on a series of projects, including eight films (111 minutes total) from Pasolini to Medea to Children of Chernobyl to Burning, 1946-2024.

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The latter is a powerful endurance test set to images of fire in which Smith recites the names and acres burned of wildfires worldwide since the year she was born. Her voice is steady and clear, yet emotion emerges as the list goes on. At the beginning, the annual fires were few and the acres were in the thousands, but by the early 2020s the count had ballooned and the scorched earth reached millions. “It almost made me want to throw up, really,” says Smith of the gravity of speaking every fire. “The idea was to do it very scientifically but at some point it's just too hard… Now we have to add, sadly, Los Angeles.” This never-ending reality looms heavy in the room. And while the fire film feels particularly poignant with LA burning, the reality is that no matter when this film would play, it would be relevant because fire is perpetual. “It's nonstop, burning everywhere, permanently constantly,” Crasneanscki agrees.

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For these works, Crasneanscki, who founded the artist collective in 2000, sources field recordings from remote places around the world—from Mexico to Ethiopia to the Himalayas—with Smith in mind. “The overlapping creates possibilities for unexpected encounters,” he says. Together, the films feel almost Lynchian, free associative like a dreamscape where disparate scenes blend together until connections come into focus. At the heart is the convergence of the individualistic inclination of the poet and the collective, devastating impact of climate change. “We are making a soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist yet,” says Crasneanscki, “and it is never ending.”

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“Soundwalk Collective & Patti Smith: Correspondences” is on view until February 22, 2025 at Kurimanzutto at 516 W 20th St, New York, NY 10011.