Interview with Stephan Crasneanscki and Patti Smith

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

In this interview, filmed within the CORRESPONDENCES exhibition, Stephan Crasneanscki, founder of Soundwalk Collective, and Patti Smith reflect on how they conceived and shaped the exhibition together through a creative collaboration that has evolved for more than a decade.

The idea of “correspondence,” which gives the exhibition its title, can be understood in two ways. It evokes letters exchanged over the years, in the tradition of 19th-century correspondence, but also the echoes and resonances that emerge between works. Different figures are thus brought together: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Medea, the children of Pripyat and Andrei Rublev, or Peter Kropotkin and a Siberian shaman. A central presence running throughout the project, the shaman is a figure whose origins Patti Smith explores in the interview.

Stephan Crasneanscki and Patti Smith offer several entry points into the exhibition and their reflections on the fragility of the natural world. They also discuss their creative process, shaped by ongoing dialogue, the gathering of images, and layers of history that gradually overlap and intertwine to form a new web of associations.