Interview with Stephan Crasneanscki and Patti Smith

Speaker(s): Soundwalk Collective, Patti Smith
Duration: 6 min
© Victor & Simon

In this filmed interview, recorded within the CORRESPONDENCES exhibition, Stephan Crasneanscki, founder of Soundwalk Collective, and Patti Smith reflect on how they conceived and developed the exhibition together, drawing on a creative partnership that has continued to evolve over more than a decade.

The idea of “correspondence,” from which the exhibition takes its title, unfolds in two ways. It evokes the exchange of letters over time, in the tradition of 19th-century correspondence, while also suggesting the echoes and resonances that connect one work to another. Pier Paolo Pasolini meets Medea, the children of Pripyat encounter Andrei Rublev, and Peter Kropotkin enters into dialogue with a Siberian shaman. A recurring presence throughout the project, the shaman becomes one of its central figures, whose origins Patti Smith traces in the interview.

Throughout the interview, Crasneanscki and Smith offer multiple ways into an exhibition that reflects, among other things, on the fragility of the natural world. They also shed light on their creative process, shaped by dialogue, collected images, and overlapping layers of history that gradually converge and intertwine to form a new web of connections.